Recombinant Search at Temporary Gatherings
David R. Clough, Tommy Pan Fang, Andy Wu · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2023
Temporary gatherings—such as conferences, trade shows, and festivals—create a forum where strangers interact with one another. The infusion of new social interactions may permit knowledge transfers that facilitate recombinant search. However, knowledge transfer is not assured: social interactions at a temporary gathering may have low information carrying capacity. In this study, we examine under what conditions temporary gatherings catalyze the creation of novel combinations. We examine a large sample of technological combinations created at software development hackathons. We find that while hackathons are a fertile environment for developers to create applications that implement novel combinations of technologies, the distribution of inventive activity between developers is highly skewed, with only one in six developers introducing a novel combination. We find many hackathon projects contain unconventional technology combinations (i.e., combinations with a low base rate of appearance), suggestive of potential for breakthrough innovation. At the same time, under the influence of common contextual cues—including peer attendees and corporate sponsors—multiple developers within a hackathon sometimes arrive at the same novel technology combinations. An attendee’s search path at a temporary gathering thus appears to diverge from the search paths of non-attendees but converge with other attendees at the gathering. Our work has implications for research on technology brokering, knowledge transfers in networks, and simultaneous discoveries.