抄録
The purpose of this paper is to reconsider the concept of network centrality which has been extensively used in the previous studies of communication behavior in R&D organizations. While those studies maintain that organizational members with high levels of indegree, called “gatekeepers”, play a critical role in the innovation process, we will propose a new network centrality concept, information flow betweeness, and show that organizational members with high levels in this measure also contribute to R&D activities in organizations. These members mediate the communication between gatekeepers (external communication stars) and transformers (internal communication stars) and play the role of translating external information into the local coding scheme, which will facilitate knowledge transformation of this external information into organization specific knowledge by transformers.
