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MAGICS Lab

Strategic Management Journal · 2026

Core or Periphery: Examining Where to Allocate Heterogeneous Inventors and the Impact on Firms' Innovation

Where heterogeneous inventors sit in a firm's network changes what the firm can discover.

Babak Heydari, Shinjinee Chattopadhyay, Soumyakant Padhee, Samina Karim

Three-layer model diagram: inventor types layer (heterogeneity in search distance and adoption approach), organization-design layer (core-periphery networks for information sharing), and performance-landscape layer (a rugged NK-style landscape), with arrows describing how types are allocated to network positions and how agents search and feed back performance scores.
Three-layer model diagram: inventor types layer (heterogeneity in search distance and adoption approach), organization-design layer (core-periphery networks for information sharing), and performance-landscape layer (a rugged NK-style landscape), with arrows describing how types are allocated to network positions and how agents search and feed back performance scores.

Where in a firm’s internal network should different kinds of inventors sit to maximize innovation? Using an NK model that captures network embeddedness, individual heterogeneity (search distance and imitation propensity), and landscape complexity, the paper shows that in high-complexity environments firms benefit from placing low-imitators at the core and high-imitators at the periphery — promoting independent search where the structure most amplifies it.

The pattern flips under low complexity, and when individual types are unknown, adoption propensity turns out to be a more useful sorting signal than search distance.