Here is an excerpt from an article written by Linus Dahlander and Siobhan O’Mahony for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, obtain subscription information, and receive HBR email alerts, please click here.

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Bill Joy, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, was famous for saying, “Not all smart people work for you.”

Companies know this. That’s why many seek to tap the potential of “open innovation” by encouraging their employees to scout for new ideas among external partners, such as universities, research institutes, competitors, and customers. Companies as diverse as Procter and Gamble, Henkel, Lego, and Bosch are all using technology scouts to import ideas from external sources.

Much research suggests that exposing employees to a broad range of external partners can lead to more innovation at the company. But if they spend too much time searching for new ideas outside their firm, this could detract from the work they do inside the company. They will presumably have less time to attend internal meetings, talk to colleagues, and stay on top of email. So while they may be increasing the potential for future innovation, their time away from firm activities could negatively affect the firm’s current productivity.

Together with David Gann from Imperial College London, we conducted field research at IBM to explore whether searching for new ideas outside the firm led to greater innovation for the company. We studied 615 IBM employees who were either Distinguished Engineers or nominated to the Academy of Technology — two bodies of senior technical experts explicitly tasked with searching for new ideas. Together, these two groups of experts produce a substantial amount of IBM’s patents, which is serious business for IBM. IBM has been the most active patenting organization in the U.S. for the past 24 years: In 2016, IBMers were granted more than 22 patents per day and IBM became the first firm to surpass 8,000 patents awarded in a single year.

These high-performing senior technical experts are granted significant autonomy as to how they search for new ideas, who they interact with, and how they spend their time. As one expert explained to us: “Our job is to figure out what the next [thing] is, to sift all the possible things, which ones are going to matter to IBM and then go out and figure out what is really happening and come back with recommendations…Why we think this matters, how we think this is going to play out and where IBM should fit in.”

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Linus Dahlander (@linusdahlander) is an associate professor of strategy at ESMT Berlin. His work focuses on innovation, entrepreneurship, and networks. Siobhan O’Mahony is an associate professor and Chair of the Strategy and Innovation Department at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.