Transferring Social Capital Across Knowledge Domains: The Case of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology

New ‘networked’ modes of innovation increasingly emphasize the need for organizations to rely on external relationships in R&D and bring in knowledge and competences from domains outside the commercial realm. This has created opportunities for individual knowledge workers to function as critical conduits of knowledge and resources across domains of knowledge that are institutionally distant but interdependent - as the science and technology - for the knowledge creation process. The present paper explores how individual researchers accumulate and transfer social capital across these domains to generate novel knowhow. We specifically focus the attention on the structural dimension of social capital. Our empirical analysis is based on a 20-year longitudinal sample of authors, inventors, and author-inventors involved in the emerging field of nanoscience and nanotechnology.