Mark Granovetter, a social psychologist, looked at this phenomenon in terms of social ties. In his terminology, a group of individuals are said to have strong social ties if they share people that they know. This frequently occurs in the scientific community where researchers often know their counterparts and other people working in the same field. These connections can be internal within the same organisation or external involving academia or industry associations (in terms of yellow and green blocks below). This is shown in the diagram below - the domain knowledge is shown in terms of depth, whereas innovation often occurs by bridging these domains.
Domain knowledge tends to build strong social ties. However, as many researchers have already noted, the ties that bind are the ties that blind.
Individuals are said to have weak social ties if they do not share many connections with each other. In these situations, individuals share few mutual connections/acquaintances.Innovation tends to originate from a balance of strong and weak ties.
The interesting thing here is that Research Labs tend to drive domain knowledge and as such individuals build strong social ties. So the issue becomes how do we maintain the balance between the two. This is what Andrew Hargadon has referred to as technology brokering - the ability for some individuals to be able to bridge these knowledge domains.
In the 1980's when I worked in HP's Research Labs, these "technology brokers" were referred to as "Renaissance Men". If you look up the definition on Wikipeadia, you will find it is the same concept, just different words.
