Date: 24^th December, 2019

Time: 14:30 – 16:30 p.m.

Venue: Room 1102, Administration Building, Zijingang Campus, Zhejiang University.

【Speaker Introduction】：Dr. Yansong Hu is an associate professor of marketing at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, UK. His research interests focus on the development of new products, new technologies and services, His research has been published in leading journals in marketing and management. His past research has won various international awards. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Business Research, a research affiliate at the China Management Research Center Cambridge University, and a regular reviewer for journals in marketing and innovation research.

【Lecture Abstract】：Recently the topic of how corporate board interlocks can affect innovations has attracted increasing attention. Yet, the impact of corporate board interlocks on service innovations, a key issue in the innovation literature, has been overlooked. Addressing this gap, the authors consider how the service innovation of a firm can be influenced by its position in the corporate board interlocks, in particular, its diversity of the ego network within the corporate board interlocks. They suggest that ego network diversity provides firms with access to a diversified knowledge and information and therefore facilitates the development of new services. Applying social network theory, the authors propose that the positive effect of ego network diversity on a firm’s service innovations is enhanced by its global betweenness and closeness centrality within the corporate board interlocks. And the results confirm the prediction on the effect of betweenness centrality. The findings highlight the different contingent roles of board interlocks on service innovation outcomes and contribute to the literature on service innovations, board interlocks, and social networks.