Project Social Capital in Biotech R&D: Its Configuration and Impact on Knowledge Development

This study investigates the impact of projects’ social capital on knowledge development in R&D projects. To test our theoretical conjecture we explored structural properties of project social capital and the degree of knowledge development of a population of 53 biotech R&D projects located at one of the most important science parks in Sweden. We chose this particular setting because the adoption of hybrid forms of organizing is important in this field given the increasing instability and uncertainty under the environmental conditions which organizations have to deal with, and also because biotech R&D is an ideal setting to study project social capital since it has widely been recognized as a context in which the social capital is an important performance determinant. Our results show an inverted U-shaped relationship between projects’ network diversity and their level of knowledge development, demonstrating that intermediate levels of diversity maximize project knowledge development. The results of this study provide valuable input for the development and management of networks within hybrid organizations.