The symbolic innovation of the bioinformatics discipline: a political networks approach to it development

In knowledge intensive firms IT is viewed as a means of cutting across bureaucratic barriers, organisational complexity, and a tool for enhancing knowledgerelated activities. In the pharmaceutical industry this IT-led transformation coincided with other socio-technological phenomena such as biotechnology and the Human Genome Project. The organisational uncertainty arising from the challenges of absorbing the new knowledge created an organisational vacuum. This vacuum was filled by entrepreneurial scientists knowledgeable in both bio-science and IT and dubbed themselves as bio-informaticians. In a romantic sense these corporate entrepreneurs were allowed to explore the "wild frontiers" of pharmaceutical R&D research. This paper relies on actor-network theory (ANT) as an interpretation lens for clarifying the diverse elements that enabled the successful creation of that organisational space. An in-depth exploratory case study is used here with a framework based on ANT used for coding, organising and interpreting the qualitative data. The findings highlight the importance and challenges an established company faces in absorbing new knowledge and technology and the importance of leveraging the entrepreneurial instincts of its employees in order to create and absorb new knowledge.