TECHNOLOGICAL COMMUNITIES AND THE DIFFUSION OF KNOWLEDGE - A REPLICATION AND VALIDATION

In a previous paper, we have argued that technological communities pro vide a useful level of analysis to examine information and knowledge f lows among researchers. Based on an international survey of more than 700 scientists and engineers engaged in the development of neural netw ork technology, the information and knowledge exchange patterns of two important subsets of that particular technological community, i.e. ac ademic researchers and industrial researchers, were explored. The anal yses demonstrated that industrial researchers, even if they are more c ommercially oriented than their colleagues in academia, recognise the professional community as a relevant locus of information and knowledg e. An obvious methodological need exists, though, to generalize beyond the neural networks community. This is the aim of the present paper. Based on questionnaire surveys of researchers belonging to two other t echnological communities, the empirical results from the neural networ k community study are replicated and, to a large extent, validated.