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Melissa Appleyard, Ph.D., Ames Professor in the Management of Innovation and Technology |
With
a Ph.D. is in Economics from U.C. Berkeley, Dr. Melissa Appleyard brings
her expertise in helping businesses manage constant change to her new
role as one of the first Ames Professors in the Management of Innovation
and Technology. Over the past decade, she has concentrated on the
global semiconductor industry’s ability to achieve perpetual innovation
in design, process integration, and manufacturing. One of her current
research projects explores the unprecedented cooperation across semiconductor
firms—including fierce rivals—in the development of next generation lithography
systems that pattern silicon wafers on a nanoscale. Through a new
grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, she also is investigating the
“expertise networks” cultivated by engineers at leading companies.
Dr. Appleyard’s work has been published in leading academic journals such
as the Strategic Management Journal, Industrial Relations, and California
Management Review, and she has worked with a variety of business organizations
on research projects and business cases for MBA and executive courses.
Dr. Appleyard received the Learning
by Engineering Professionals in Corporate Settings grant from the Alfred
P. Sloan Foundation. The goal of the study is to understand the dynamics
behind expertise acquisition in the leading companies that have driven
worldwide economic growth. In particular, it is to understand expertise
networks in addition to other learning processes used by employees in
technology-intensive industries. From an academic standpoint, this
study will contribute to the learning and knowledge management literature
by detailing individuals’ expertise acquisition routines that include
people sources, non-people sources, and formal learning processes. Additional
richness will be added by detailing what kind of expertise is acquired
from the various sources.
The study will survey technologists, with a focus on engineers in this
initial study, to determine how they acquire expertise during a self-specified
problem-solving activity. It will also survey their supervisors
to understand the payoffs to their tapping into various sources of expertise
in terms of problem-solving innovativeness, quality, and timeliness. To
the participating individuals and companies, a comprehensive statistical
analysis of the expertise networks will be provided and also will provide
input on how the networks compare with those found in other organizations.
From a company’s perspective, an understanding of these networks and processes
is invaluable when forming project teams, designing outsourcing strategies,
planning reorganizations, constructing training programs, etc. From
an academic perspective, this research will contribute to the social network
literature by including a more detailed account as to what expertise flows
across network ties and how this expertise is augmented by non-people
sources and formal learning experiences, including digitally mediated
learning (eLearning).
© 2003 Portland State University SBA
