In Search of a Network Organization for TNC’s Innovation

During the past three decades, there are massive researches on innovation networks and network organizations. However, researchers are holding different understandings, some of which even conflict with each other, thus this paper makes an inductive conceptual analysis to clarify what is a network organization among many kinds of innovation networks based on review of relative literatures. Then this paper moves one step further to introduce a network perspective, i.e. network is the context of firms as well as TNCs, and market and hierarchy can be analyzed from a network approach. Further on, this paper discusses the theoretical foundation of network organization, and proposes that since a focal firm has different strength of power in different levels of network, it will have different roles and may not always have the power to “manage” an innovation network.