Abstract Research Summary Social networks are integral to collaborative work, but research on network change has shed little light on the mechanisms firms use to stimulate collaborative network ties among their employees. In this study, we examine the effects of corporate offsites on the evolution of social networks within an organization. We find that offsites lead to rewiring of intraorganizational networks, but with a surprising asymmetry: they stimulate everyone to initiate more collaboration ties, but only those who attend the offsite receive more ties. These results are consistent with a conceptualization of offsites as direct interventions that focus on social interactions for those who attend, but also as indirect interventions that signal the value of collaboration to everyone, even those who do not attend. Managerial Summary Corporate offsites are events that convene people from across a firm to interact outside their regular work environment. Despite their popularity, this article offers the first data‐driven analysis of their effectiveness in promoting collaboration among employees. Offsites facilitate employees' awareness of who knows what, build trust, and foster interpersonal affect among employees. This study shows that offsites have a dual effect on the social network of an organization: they prompt everyone in the firm to initiate more collaborative ties following an offsite, but those who actually attend the offsite attract more of those collaborative tie requests. Therefore, offsites can be a useful tool to boost collaboration—with benefits accruing both to the individuals whose networks grow and to the firm in which they work.

Most innovation builds closely on existing knowledge and technology, delivering incremental advances on existing ideas, products, and processes. Sometimes, however, inventors make discoveries that seem very distant from what is known and well understood. How do individuals and firms explore such uncharted technological terrain? This paper extends research on knowledge networks and innovation to propose three main processes of knowledge creation that are more likely to result in discoveries that are distant from existing inventions: long search paths, scientific reasoning, and distant recombination. We explore these processes with a combination of a large and unique data set on outlier patents filed at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and interviews with inventors of outlier patents. Our exploratory analysis suggests that there are significant differences in the inventor teams, assignees, and search processes that result in outlier patents. These results have important implications for managers who wish to encourage a more exploratory search for breakthrough innovation.