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4 March 2025, 15:30-17 CET / 9:30-11 EST

Craft Skill and Recombinant Innovation: Forge Occupations as Brokers Between Innovation-driven Fields

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Danielle Bovenberg
Yale School of Management

Abstract: The recombination of knowledge underpins innovation in art, science, and technology. Each of these innovation-driven social worlds comprises a rich ecology of specialized occupational groups who collaborate in creative production. Yet, our theories of recombinant innovation largely presuppose that recombination is done by just a single actor in this division of labor: relatively high-status “inventor” occupations. This limits our ability to account for patterns of recombination at frontiers where collaboration between occupational groups is essential. In this paper, I show how patterned forms of knowledge recombination can occur through the work of a class of actors I call “forge occupations” – the specialized technical workers who steward the materials, tools, and techniques that inventors in a field have in common. As stewards of their community’s “forge technologies” – the tools for turning abstract ideas into concrete prototypes – these workers function both at the technical core of inventive endeavors and at the center of their community’s social structure. This paper identifies the characteristic ways that members of forge occupations facilitate knowledge recombination among otherwise distant domains, and how their contributions differ from those of the inventors traditionally considered in accounts of recombination. To do so, I draw on a multi-year ethnographic study of four organizations that make the tools of nanoscale R&D available to researchers in domains as diverse as semiconductor engineering and biotechnology. I draw on ethnographic observations and sociological theories of craft skill to show how technicians at these facilities recognized and exploited opportunities for recombination among the projects they supported. I thereby uncover previously unrecognized pathways for recombinant innovation: pathways not anchored in the concepts and commitments of any one discipline or domain, but rather resting on pragmatic craft knowledge of the materials and tools that underpin multiple domains.

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