外部搜寻、联结强度、吸收能力与创新绩效的关系

从企业边界理论和知识基础观出发,研究搜寻宽度和搜寻深度对组织探索式创新绩效和应用式创新绩效的影响;引入联结强度和吸收能力作为情景变量,探讨二者对主效应的调节作用;利用三项交互方法,探讨外部搜寻战略、联结强度和吸收能力三者的交互作用对创新绩效的影响;以281家本土制造业企业为样本,利用分层回归分析和三项交互分析方法进行实证研究。 研究结果表明,搜寻宽度与探索式创新绩效正相关,与应用式创新绩效呈倒U形关系,搜寻深度与应用式创新绩效正相关;联结强度负向调节搜寻宽度与探索式创新绩效之间的关系,正向调节搜寻深度与应用式创新绩效之间的关系;实际吸收能力正向调节搜寻宽度与探索式创新绩效之间的关系,潜在吸收能力正向调节搜寻深度与应用式创新绩效之间的关系;搜寻宽度、联结强度和实际吸收能力三者交互项与探索式创新绩效负相关,搜寻深度、联结强度和潜在吸收能力三者交互项与应用式创新绩效正相关。 通过探讨外部搜寻、联结强度和吸收能力的三项交互作用对创新绩效的影响,发现搜寻宽度和搜寻深度对创新绩效的显著差异化影响,有助于从一个新的视角解释外部搜寻与创新绩效之间的“关系争论”;已有外部搜寻研究往往忽略组织间的联结机制,通过引入联结强度,弥补了联结机制的缺失;区别于已有吸收能力的直接效应研究,将吸收能力作为调节变量分情景讨论,丰富了吸收能力的权变视角研究。研究结果有助于加强外部搜寻理论研究,并一定程度上有利于指导中国企业具体创新实践。     

Relative capacity: Retaining knowledge outside a firm's boundaries

Besides internalizing external knowledge, companies may maintain knowledge in interfirm relationships over time. Thus, interorganizational relations may be regarded as an extended knowledge base to which a firm has privileged access. We merge research into knowledge management, absorptive capacity, learning, and dynamic capabilities to analyze knowledge retention outside a firm's boundaries. Prior research into knowledge management has focused on internally storing knowledge, whereas research into knowledge transactions has primarily studied the internalization of external knowledge. The need to dynamically manage knowledge in interfirm relations over time – without necessarily internalizing this knowledge – has been relatively neglected. Therefore, we develop the foundations of the dynamic capability-based concept of relative capacity as a complement to absorptive capacity and transformative capacity in external knowledge retention. Relative capacity contributes to explaining interfirm differences in knowledge strategies, alliance strategies, organizational boundaries, open innovation, and performance. To guide further research, propositions are advanced regarding the antecedents and consequences of relative capacity.     

Breadth of external knowledge sourcing and product innovation: The moderating role of strategic human resource practices

Prior research has argued that external knowledge sourcing can be supported by effective strategic human resource (HR) practices. However, whether and how the adoption of new organizational mechanisms in group settings influences the relationship between external search strategies and innovation performance represents an unanswered question. Therefore, the present paper aims to explore the relationship between the breadth of external knowledge sourcing (i.e., external search breadth) and product innovation by unveiling the moderating effects of strategic HR practices, as represented by the implementation of heterogeneous work groups and brainstorming sessions. On the basis of data from the Italian Innovation Survey, our results reveal that external search breadth is curvilinearly (inverted U) related to product innovation, and its negative effects occur later in the presence of heterogeneous work groups and brainstorming sessions.     

Exploring the antecedents of potential absorptive capacity and its impact on innovation performance

This paper builds upon the theoretical framework developed by Zahra and George [Absorptive capacity: a review, reconceptualization, and extension. Academy of Management Review 2002;27:185–203] to empirically explore the antecedents of potential absorptive capacity (PAC), i.e. the ability to identify and assimilate external knowledge flows. Based on a sample of 2464 innovative Spanish firms, we find evidence that R&D cooperation, external knowledge acquisition and experience with knowledge search are key antecedents of a firm's PAC. Also, during periods of important internal reshaping, when there are significant changes in strategy, design of the organization and marketing, firms exert more effort to accumulate PAC. Finally, we find that PAC is a source of competitive advantage in innovation, especially in the presence of efficient internal knowledge flows that help reduce the distance between potential and realized capacity.     

知识分布、衰减程度与产业集群创新模式的内在机制研究

以知识流动为研究视角，将集群创新过程中的知识溢出、吸收能力内生化，构建包含三种创新模式下的产业集群演化模型，重点分析集群知识分布和知识衰减程度与集群创新模式的内在机制及其对创新产出的影响，并进行仿真实验。研究表明：不同知识分布下，混合创新模式的创新产出表现最好，外部吸收创新模式与内部自主创新模式呈现出不同的创新产出演化路径；在外部吸收创新和混合创新模式下，均匀分布型产业集群的创新产出表现最好，集中分布型表现次之，异质分布型表现最差，而在内部自主创新模式下，集中分布型则表现最好；不同创新模式对知识衰减的敏感程度呈现阶段性差异特征。这些结论对产业集群创新和可持续发展具有很好的理论和实践指导意义。     

The role of absorptive capacity and innovation strategy in the design of industry 4.0 business Models - A comparison between SMEs and large enterprises

Technological innovations often lead to redesigns in the business models of established companies, requiring them to incorporate new external knowledge into internal activities. Against this background, this study integrates the concepts of business model design, absorptive capacity, and innovation strategy into a novel research model, which analyzes the redesign of established business models in response to the emergence of Industry 4.0. Industry 4.0, also known as the Industrial Internet of Things, constitutes a contemporary research context that is highly relevant for corporate practice but scarcely regarded in management literature until now. The article contains an analysis of data from 221 German industrial enterprises, conducted through structural equation modeling, with separate data for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and large enterprises. First, the results indicate that the acquisition, assimilation, transformation, and exploitation of knowledge from the environment enable companies to engage in both exploratory and exploitative innovation strategies. Furthermore, the paper includes an evaluation of the role of exploratory and exploitative innovation strategies that reflects in efficiency-centered and novelty-centered business model designs. The distinct characteristics differentiating SMEs from large enterprises are also explained. The implications of absorptive capacity on innovation strategies, which influence the redesign of extant business models, are discussed from a research and managerial perspective.     

Leveraging Open Innovation Using Intermediary Networks

Open innovation, fuelled by the rise of the Internet, has made it feasible and cheaper for firms to open themselves up to a wide range of external sources of innovative ideas. The explosive growth of open innovation intermediary networks, such as InnoCentive or Linked‐in, enables the rapid pairing of firms seeking knowledge to address a wide range of business challenges (seekers) with other firms or individuals who already have relevant knowledge (solvers or knowledge brokers). These intermediary networks allow procurement departments to source codified and un‐codified knowledge from firms or individuals outside their traditional supplier networks using one‐off transactional relationships. Although sourcing ideas in this way theoretically poses problems for knowledge search and transfer, we have found that companies can draw on processes and integration mechanisms developed by procurement and design engineering to develop effective organizational learning routines. These routines are strategically vital to source new ideas through open innovation using intermediary networks and create competitive advantage.     

Knowledge infrastructure capability,absorptive capacity and inbound open innovation: evidence from SMEs in France

Abstract

Inbound open innovation (IOI) has become a potentially valuable means of gaining competitive advantage and enhancing organizational performance. This article explores how knowledge infrastructure capability (KIC) affects IOI through the moderating role of absorptive capacity. This research conceptualizes and develops three dimensions of KIC (technological, structural and cultural), and tests the relationships between KIC, absorptive capacity and IOI. Data for the study were collected from 125 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) based in France, and the relationships proposed in the framework were tested using structural equation modeling (SEM). The results indicate that higher levels of KIC can lead to enhanced absorptive capacity and improved IOI. That is, KIC can have a direct, positive impact on absorptive capacity and IOI. Moreover, absorptive capacity partially mediates the linkage between KIC and IOI. The article contributes to the conceptualization of the impact of KIC on IOI, by emphasizing a firm’s absorptive capacity. It offers a validated instrument to measure KIC, and provides an empirical evidence of the impact of KIC on absorptive capacity and IOI. This article also extends the extant literature by focusing on KIC and absorptive capacity simultaneously in a model to understand the notion of IOI in the SMEs based in France. This study offers useful guidance for measuring and implementing KIC in a SME context and encourages further research in this area.     

社会资本、吸收能力对创新绩效影响的实证研究

以企业知识理论为基础,从吸收能力这一视角出发,剖析企业外部社会资本和内部社会资本与企业创新绩效之间的关系;依据经典文献,对外部社会互动、基于认知的信任、共同语言、内部社会互动、基于情感的信任和共同愿景与知识识别、知识获取、知识共享和知识应用的关系进行重新梳理,并对知识应用与企业创新绩效的关系进行阐述;构建概念模型,并采用469个样本进行实证。研究结果表明,基于认知的信任、共同语言促进知识识别,外部社会互动、共同语言促进知识获取,内部社会互动抑制知识共享,基于情感的信任、共同愿景促进知识共享,基于情感的信任促进知识应用,知识识别促进知识获取,知识获取促进知识共享和知识应用,知识共享促进知识应用,知识应用促进企业创新绩效。从整体上看,吸收能力在企业社会资本对企业创新绩效的影响中起中介作用。     

Enriching Absorptive Capacity through Social Interaction

Absorptive capacity is frequently highlighted as a key determinant of knowledge transfer within multinational enterprises. But how individual behaviour translates into absorptive capacity at the subsidiary level, and how this is contingent on subsidiaries' social context, remains under‐addressed. This not only limits our understanding of the relationship between individual‐ and organizational‐level absorptive capacity, but also hampers further research on potentially relevant managerial and organizational antecedents, and limits the implications we can draw for practitioners who seek to increase their organization's capacity to put new knowledge to use. To address this shortcoming we conduct an in‐depth comparative case study of a headquarters‐initiated knowledge transfer at two subsidiaries of the same multinational enterprise. The findings demonstrate that social interaction is a prerequisite for subsidiary absorptive capacity as it enables employees to participate in the transformation of new knowledge to the local context and the development of local applications. The findings also illustrate how organizational conditions at the subsidiary level can impact subsidiary absorptive capacity by enabling or constraining local interaction patterns. These insights contribute to the absorptive capacity literature by demonstrating the scale and scope of social interaction as a key link between individual‐ and organizational‐level absorptive capacity.     

企业知识吸收能力与绩效的关系研究

在资源基础理论的基础上,通过对我国不同行业近200家企业的问卷调研,运用实证分析剖析企业知识吸收能力,揭示了知识转化和创新能力与绩效之间的关系,认为在探讨企业的知识吸收能力上,应该重视企业内部支持与外部支持的影响作用,并阐明在知识吸收能力中,知识转化能力会在很大程度上影响企业的绩效水平,而其知识创新能力的影响不明显。     

Organizational learning in SMEs’ internationalization: A moderated mediating effect of absorptive capacity

We examine both mediation and moderation effects on the direct relationship between internationalization speed and firm performance in the context of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Building on prior studies that focus either on the direct speed–performance linkage or the moderating role played by knowledge, we suggest that an important source of performance variations is organizational learning. Grounded in the organizational learning perspective, we argue that firm strategies regarding speed and earliness of internationalization provide the SMEs with opportunities to develop their absorptive capacity, and thus enhance their performance. Using survey data from 343 SMEs in Australia and New Zealand, our empirical results suggest that absorptive capacity is associated with internationalization speed in a reversed U-shape relationship and that in turn absorptive capacity mediates the direct speed–performance relationship. Moreover, this mediating effect is moderated by earliness of internationalization. By demonstrating the moderated mediating effect of absorptive capacity as a novel mechanism to achieving superior performance, we enhance the understanding of how firms succeed internationally.     

Combinations of absorptive capacity metaroutines: The role of organizational disruptions and time constraints

This paper explores absorptive capacity metaroutines in a financial organization that experienced a large-scale misappropriation episode. We selected an instrumental case and collected individual semi-structured interviews, on-site nonparticipant observations, and documents to better understand the combination of absorptive capacity in organizational contexts. Findings revealed that the magnitude of organizational disruptions and time constraints influenced absorptive capacity metaroutines. The magnitude of organizational disruptions related to the intensity of required change for innovation adoption and the persistence of outcomes, while time constraints influenced the degree of involvement and cohesiveness of organizational members. In addition, findings showed that the combination of absorptive capacity metaroutines experienced asymmetries and had incremental and cumulative features. This work extends current theorizations of absorptive capacity conceptualized from a micro-foundation perspective as a collection of external and internal metaroutines and provides a means to start understanding potential factors that influence the combination of absorptive capacity metaroutines. Implications for theory and practice are discussed, and suggestions for future research are offered.     

Foreign Competition and Innovation: The Mediating Role of Imitation

This study examines the extent to which foreign competition affects the innovation performance of domestic firms through imitation, given firms’ absorptive capacity. In analysing longitudinal firm‐level data from the UK, we find a mediating effect of imitation on the relationship between foreign competition and local firms’ innovation performance, and an inverted U‐shaped relationship between imitation and the innovation performance of local firms. Our findings further reveal that absorptive capacity moderates the mediating effect of imitation, diminishing innovation gains at moderate levels of imitation and mitigating the diminishing innovation performance at high levels of imitation.     

Changes in Product Attributes and Costs as Drivers of New Product Diffusion and Substitution

Diffusion theory has typically focused on how communication, internal or external to a social system, leads to adoptions and diffusion of an innovation. We develop a diffusion and substitution model based on a somewhat different perspective. In some cases, progressive improvements in product attributes and/or continual cost reduction seem to be a key driver of the diffusion process. For example, after introduction of the 5.25‐inch disk drive, its capacity continually increased, and accordingly, so did customer willingness‐to‐pay. Our model is based on a linear reservation price framework, in which a product is described by its depth (defined as the difference between a product̂s maximum reservation price and its production cost), and its breadth (related to the slope of its reservation price curve), indicating how broadly it appeals across various customer segments. Because of changes in product depths and breadths over time, customers who previously preferred the old product may later prefer the new product, thus creating the diffusion process. While the Bass model describes diffusion as a function of the coefficients of innovation and imitation, in our model, it is described by the coefficients of depth and breadth (the rates of change in relative depth and breadth), along with an S‐coefficient that we associate with the technology S‐curve. We fit our model to data from the disk‐drive and the microprocessor industries.     

Open Government: Theoretische Bezüge und konzeptionelle Grundlagen einer neuen Entwicklung in Staat und ?ffentlichen Verwaltungen

New models of innovation have suggested that the innovation process of product and service development is becoming more open, emphasizing the importance of external knowledge and systematically involving external actors and sources in innovation endeavours. The growing success of open innovation practices in many firms raises the question whether these principles can be transferred for reinventing public sector organisations. Beyond technocratic eGovernment and digitalization effort, but with support of web 2.0 technology, we present first examples of how external collaboration and innovation with citizens for public administrations can offer new ways of citizen integration, enhancing public value creation and the political decision making process. In the following, theoretical references and conceptual foundations of this development are identified. By intensive use of internet technologies the aim of Open Government is to achieve more transparency, more participation and a closer collaboration with the various stakeholders in the public sector.     

智力资本对顾客参与的驱动影响：转化式学习视角

当前,智力资本影响顾客参与的复杂化发展趋势越来越明显。借鉴资源基础理论、企业吸收能力理论和开放式创新理论的代表性观点,探索智力资本对顾客参与的直接影响和转化式学习视角的间接影响机制是顺应企业实践发展趋势和弥补已有研究缺憾的必然。 在解构智力资本和顾客参与维度的基础上,引入转化式学习的概念,构建智力资本直接影响顾客参与及其通过转化式学习间接影响顾客参与机制的框架模型并提出具体假设,以江苏省创新型企业的独立新产品开发项目为取样单元,收集到255份有效问卷,运用Lisrel 8.70软件中的结构方程模型方法进行假设验证。 研究结果表明,作为智力资本的3个维度,人力资本、结构资本、关系资本对顾客参与的参与制度和参与程度具有直接而积极的影响;转化式学习在人力资本、结构资本和关系资本影响参与制度和参与程度的关系中起到一定程度的中介效应。 研究结果从学术层面厘清了智力资本、顾客参与的关键维度构成以及两者之间的复杂影响关系,为企业重新认识智力资本和顾客参与的丰富实践内涵提供理论依据,使企业从人力资本、结构资本和关系资本组成视角积累有益于直接驱动顾客参与的智力资本成为可能,向企业提供了通过构建转化式学习机制以充分发挥智力资本对顾客参与的间接驱动效应的可操作工具。     

Research on the Elements of Firm's IS Absorptive Capacity

In this paper, we explore the capacity during the process of a firm's information system adoption and implementation from knowledge management perspective, based on a firm's level construct. According to the di- mensions of absorptive capacity proposed by Zahra and George, we point out that the concept of IS absorptive ca- pacity, analyze and summarize the elements of potential absorptive capacity and realized absorptive capacity. We use data from two manufacturing organizations, analyze two firm's realities of IS absorptive capacity. The study indicates differing antecedents may have differing effects on potential absorptive capacity and realized ab- sorptive capacity.     

The multi-level effects of corporate entrepreneurial orientation on business unit radical innovation and financial performance

Corporate enterprises must support its business units to adapt to changes that are increasingly dramatic and complex. In response, corporate entities must organize to embed a corporate entrepreneurial orientation (EO) that pervades the actions of its business units to create the radical innovations needed to thrive in these circumstances. By developing a global willingness–local ability framework, we test a multi-level model of corporate EO by conceptualizing its effects on business unit radical innovation and business unit financial performance, moderated by business unit R&D resourcing and business unit absorptive capacity. With data from 2820 business units of 1290 Taiwanese corporations from two separate surveys, we find support for our theoretical expectations and contribute much-needed knowledge of the multi-level effects of EO and the conditions to turn EO into actual innovation activity and profit from it.     

Productive organizational energy mediates the impact of organizational structure on absorptive capacity

The ability of an organization to cope with radical technological change is regarded to be heavily dependent on its ability to absorb and apply knowledge from its environment. This study investigates the role of organizational structure in driving absorptive capacity and uncovers the role of the emergent phenomenon of organizational energy as the enabler of this relationship. A field study was conducted among firms that are challenged by the disruptive nature of Cloud computing. Our results show that organizational design affects the degree of mobilization of an organization's affective, cognitive and behavioral resources, which in turn influence the effectiveness of learning processes related to the absorption and exchange of knowledge within the organization. Furthermore, they reveal the positive relationship between the enactment of absorptive capacity and the successful adoption of Cloud technology for incumbent firms. The findings contribute to our understanding of the micro-foundations of absorptive capacity and how positive organizational phenomena facilitate effective adoption and implementation of emerging technologies.