Mapping the Invisible Colleges of Innovation Management Field During the Period from 1956 through 2012

The aim of this paper is to find out the Innovation Management Researchers’ main characteristics, which implies to determine the most productive ones, their categories according to production and impact, discover the invisible colleges, their research themes, and the most cited researchers in the field. A set of 387 articles was retrieved from the Social Science Citation Index corresponding to the period from 1956 to 2012, then by using Bibliometrics a classification of the corresponding research community according to production and impact was made, and were determined the invisible colleges. Next, the main invisible colleges were represented by using Social Network Analysis. Four main invisible colleges were determined, where Europe’s supremacy as geographical region, and Product Development as topic of research are more than evident.

Keywords: Bibliometrics, Co‑authorship analysis, Innovation Management, Invisible college, social network analysis.