Ambidexterity,external knowledge and performance in knowledge-intensive firms

The paper investigates the relationship between organizational ambidexterity and firm performance in knowledge-intensive firms. In particular, using a quantitative methodology involving a structural equation model, the research investigates whether external knowledge sourcing enhances the impact of ambidexterity on firm performance. The results show that organizational ambidexterity in knowledge-intensive firms does not, in fact, have a significant impact on firm performance, but it does have a positive and significant mediating effect considering external knowledge sourcing. The findings are presented along with interesting and significant implications for both theory and practice, largely stemming from the still much neglected relationship between organizational ambidexterity and external knowledge sourcing in the open innovation context.     

When should a firm collaborate with research organizations for innovation performance? The moderating role of innovation orientation,size, and age

Little is known about the conditions strengthening or weakening the impact of a firm’s collaboration with research organizations on innovation performance. Thus, this study uses a sample of 542 manufacturing firms in Korea to examine how innovation orientation and firm size and age as internal characteristics influence the relationship between collaboration with research organizations and innovation performance. The results show that collaboration with research organizations has a positive impact on innovation performance. More importantly, this effect is stronger (weaker) for firms with a strong orientation toward exploration (exploitation). In addition, older or larger firms obtain greater benefits from collaboration with research organizations. This study contributes toward clarifying a firm’s collaboration with research organizations.     

Structured uncertainty: a pilot study on innovation in China’s mobile phone handset industry

This paper explains why many small and medium-sized (SME) private high-technology Chinese manufacturing firms survive and thrive within an institutional and political system arrayed against them. We use the mobile phone handset industry as an illustrative case of the vitality and capabilities of Chinese SMEs. We argue that in capitalizing on the advantages offered by the global fragmentation of production, while also being constrained by an institutional climate of structured uncertainty, Chinese non-state firms have chosen a pattern of incremental innovation in their search for competitive advantage. Despite falling outside central government innovation plans and engaging in practices inimical to nurturing novel product innovation capabilities, these firms have a sustainable business model based on niche tailoring, rapid product introduction and utilization of standardized components.     

The impact of local linkages, international linkages, and absorptive capacity on innovation for foreign firms operating in an emerging economy

This study analyzes the impact of local linkages, international linkages, and absorptive capacity on firm innovation for firms based in one emerging economy while operating in another emerging economy. Testing research hypotheses derived from the institutional and organizational learning perspectives on a sample of 102 Taiwanese manufacturing firms operating in China, we find that the impact of international linkages is greater than that of local linkages, while both local and international linkages have a positive impact on innovation. Further analysis confirms that absorptive capacity has a stronger moderating effect on the relationship between local linkages and innovation than it does on the relationship between international linkages and innovation.     

Managing technological distance in internal and external collaborations: absorptive capacity routines and social integration for innovation

While high technological distance to project partners outside of the established value chain can positively influence innovation performance, project goals can only be achieved if the social integration of project members is improved in terms of coordination and communication. This paper draws on embeddedness and absorptive capacity literature to explore how social integration mechanisms translate into different learning outcomes in distant collaborations within and across organizational boundaries. Drawing upon expert interviews with project members as our primary source of data, we conducted an in-depth multiple case study analysis of a number of inter-organizational projects. Our findings indicate that the effect of different types of social integration mechanisms on learning outcomes also affect the ability to bridge distances in process and product technology. Moreover, they suggest that it is not just the extent, but also the interplay of social integration mechanisms surrounding internal and external absorptive capacity routines that enable project members to engage in the exploration, transformation and exploitation of distant knowledge. In examining how social integration mechanisms foster learning outcome in distant collaborations, our study contributes to the literature on absorptive capacity.     

Occupational culture as determinant of knowledge sharing and performance in police investigations

Police investigation units represent a knowledge-intensive and time-critical environment. Knowledge sharing is a key process in investigations. In this paper, we present an empirical study of performance in police investigations. Police investigation units are defined as value shops, where primary detective work is performed. Knowledge sharing is found to have a significant influence on the police investigation value shop. Furthermore, this research suggests that knowledge sharing is influenced by occupational culture. Occupational culture is a reduced, selective, and task-based version of organizational culture that is shaped by the socially relevant worlds of policing occupation. Four dimensions of occupational culture were identified: team culture, planning culture, theoretical culture, and traditional culture. Only the extent of team culture was found to have a significant influence on the extent of knowledge sharing and performance in police investigations.     

SMEs in Regional Innovation Systems and The Role of Innovation Support--The Case of Upper Austria

In the past large firms were regarded as the main driving forces for innovation, but, more recently, the interest has shifted to SMEs as well as networks of firms. It has been recognized that SMEs innovate in a specific way and that they face size-specific barriers. To be able to rely on innovation partners and to be involved in regional or national innovation systems seems to be of critical importance for SMEs. This paper presents the empirical results of a firm survey in Upper Austria, a region with a long industrial tradition in Austria, investigating the extent to which SMEs are actually engaged in innovation networks and the role of public innovation support in this context. The findings show that SMEs which have received innovation support are more successful innovators than those which have not, and that innovation cooperations are rather rare. Most external relations are with other firms and within the region, very few with knowledge providers from science and technology. At present, innovation support instruments do not sufficiently target the deficits of non-innovative SMEs and the problems in linking up with innovation networks and broadening firms' relations beyond the region.     

The effect of social networking sites and absorptive capacity on SMES’ innovation performance

The combination of knowledge and innovation has become a cornerstone among knowledge and labour intensive enterprises. A growing number of enterprises are defined as knowledge intensive entrepreneurship ventures that have been widely studied in relation to their eco-system. However only few research have addressed this phenomenon to enterprises digital eco-system by adopting mainly a qualitatively approach. We point out that the relevance of the digital eco-system focusing on the role of social networking sites in relationship to innovation and knowledge. The use of social networking sites can provide a wealth of information about individuals and their networks, which can be utilised for various business purposes. It enables enterprises to create online communities and share user-created content. Within this context, enterprises actively interact with external actors such as customers, public institutions, and other businesses to acquire and absorb external knowledge, and then generate innovation. To gain insights from the global economy, 215 small to medium enterprises from different sets of global enterprises, both knowledge-intensive (e.g. management consulting, marketing and advertising, ICT and related services, legal and technical services) and labour-intensive (such as high tech and electronics, food and beverage, and consumer durables), were analysed. Via the Partial Least Square-Path Modelling the relationships between social networking sites, absorptive capacity, and innovation performance were measured. Therefore, recommendations are proffered as to what small-medium enterprises should do in order to enhance their innovativeness. The research ends with conclusions and implications to both scholars and practitioners.     

强激励效应扩张:科层组织注意力分配与中国城市市政支出的“上下”竞争(1999—2010)

科层组织任务间竞争关系是国家治理结构失衡背后的科学问题。基于中国城市“逢雨必涝”的现象,从组织注意力分配的角度,对287个地级以上城市1999—2010年市政路桥和排水支出“上下”竞争的实证研究表明,中国科层组织绩效易测任务对不易测任务的争夺是权威体制下强激励效应扩张的结果。首先,权威体制背景下,强激励通过相对绩效和短期政绩信号两个机制塑造了这一竞争关系。其次,除了直接效应外,强激励还存在扩张效应——既构成(沟通系统集权化改革、本领域及其他领域组织任务注意力争夺等)强化这一争夺的因素起作用的前提,也造成了(监督方行政控制、代理方机构设置及外部事件央媒问责等)防止这一争夺的因素的失效。这一发现对现有组织理论及国家治理结构调整实践均有重要参考价值。     

University-industry collaborations and product innovation performance: the moderating effects of absorptive capacity and innovation competencies

While the performance implications of university-industry collaboration (UIC) have been the subject of extensive research, no study thus far has investigated the potential influence of absorptive capacity and innovation competencies on the relationship between UIC and product innovation performance. Based on a sample of 2061 German companies from two waves of the German Community Innovation Survey and using moderated multiple regression, this study examines these moderating effects and provides the following findings: (1) absorptive capacity in terms of internal R&D negatively moderates the relationship between UIC and incremental innovation performance and has no effect on the relationship between UIC and radical innovation performance; (2) absorptive capacity related to employee know-how has no moderating effect on the relationship between UIC and incremental innovation performance but positively moderates the relationship between UIC and radical innovation performance; and (3) innovation competencies exert no moderating effect on the relationship between UIC and incremental innovation performance but have a predominantly positive moderating effect on the relationship between UIC and radical innovation performance. In summary, our study provides relevant insights on the dynamics governing UIC relationships and provides evidence for potential negative effects of absorptive capacity in the context of collaborative R&D (substitution effect). Providing an in-depth analysis of UIC, this study offers insights for research in this field by explaining the variance in the outcomes of UIC. Moreover, our findings have the potential to aid practitioners (e.g., innovation managers, researchers, and governing and funding bodies) in their decisions concerning their involvement in UIC.     

How leadership enhances employees’ knowledge sharing: the intervening roles of relational and organizational identification

Knowledge exchange among employees is crucial to organizational effectiveness. Leadership can enhance or detract from employees’ willingness to share knowledge. This study examines how leadership affects knowledge sharing in a knowledge-intensive work setting. It proposes and tests a model which posits that (1) transformational leadership affects the extent to which employees identify with their manager; (2) this relational identification, mediated by the quality of LMX (Leader-Member Exchange), leads to greater identification with the organization and its goals, which in turn results in greater knowledge sharing. The sample consisted of two hundred and three R&D employees engaged in advanced technological projects. Path analysis results indicated that there are both direct and indirect (through LMX) relationships between transformational leadership and relational identification: relational identification promotes organizational identification which, in turn, is positively related to knowledge sharing. These results highlight the importance of transformational leadership and LMX for promoting relational and organizational identification, thereby facilitating employee knowledge sharing.     

Radical Transactionalism: Legal Consciousness,Diverse Economies,and the Sharing Economy

This article proposes an original theoretical approach to the analysis of community‐level action for sustainability, focusing on its troubled relationship to the sharing economy. Through a conversation between scholarship on legal consciousness and diverse economies, it shows how struggles over transactional legality are a neglected site of activism for sustainability. Recognizing the diversity of economic life and forms of law illuminates what we call ‘radical transactionalism': the creative redeployment of legal techniques and practices relating to risk management, organizational form, and the allocation of contractual and property rights in order to further the purpose of internalizing social and ecological values into the heart of economic exchange. By viewing sharing‐economy initiatives ‘beyond Airbnb and Uber’ as sites of radical transactionalism, legal building blocks of property and capital can be reimagined and reconfigured, helping to construct a shared infrastructure for the exercise of collective agency in response to disadvantage sustained by law.     

Entrepreneurial universities in two European regions: a case study comparison

An entrepreneurial university is a natural incubator that tries to provide a supportive environment in which the university community can explore, evaluate and exploit ideas that could be transformed into social and economic entrepreneurial initiatives. Entrepreneurial universities are involved in partnerships, networks and other relationships to generate an umbrella for interaction, collaboration and co-operation. Rapid developments in science, the multidisciplinary nature of frontier research, legislative changes such as the Bayh–Dole Act and demands from business and society have shaped knowledge-based entrepreneurship within universities. Despite sharing similar historical backgrounds, economic conditions and cultural and social structures, entrepreneurial universities in most countries remain distinct from one another by their institutional arrangements, traditions and characteristics unique to each organization. Interestingly, no comparative research has been conducted to understand the similarities and differences of the conditioning factors and the outcomes/outputs of entrepreneurial universities in different regions that share similar social, economic and political conditions. This paper addresses this research deficit, adopting institutional economics and resource-based view. We compare entrepreneurial universities in two European regions (Spain and Ireland) using an in-depth qualitative approach based on multiple case studies (two Spanish universities and two Irish universities) between 2006 and 2010. The findings provide organizational practices and approaches relevant to the transformation process of other regional universities seeking to become entrepreneurial.     

Constructing the License to Operate: Internal Factors and Their Influence on Corporate Environmental Decisions

Voluntary programs intended to improve corporate environmental practices have proliferated in recent years. Why some businesses choose to participate in such voluntary programs, while others do not, remains an open question. Recent work suggests that companies' environmental practices, including their decisions to participate in voluntary programs, are shaped by a license to operate comprised of social, regulatory, and economic pressures. Although these external factors do matter, by themselves they only partially explain business decision making, since facilities subject to similar external factors often behave differently. In this article, we draw from organizational theory to explain why we would expect a company's license to operate to be ultimately constructed by internal factors, such as managerial incentives, organizational culture, and organizational identity, as these shape both interpretations of the external pressures and organizational responses to them. Using qualitative data from an exploratory study of matched facilities that reached different decisions about participating in a prominent voluntary environmental program, we then report evidence indicative of the role of these internal factors in shaping facilities' environmental decisions. Finally, we offer suggestions for future research that could further develop understanding of how internal organizational characteristics influence environmental management decisions, including those concerning participation in voluntary programs.     

Social context of crime control: a time-series analysis of the Korean case, 1973–2002

Regardless of recent attempts to explain crime control in relation to its social structural conditions, few studies have assessed the economic, organizational, and political context of crime control simultaneously. This study integrated these three contexts into a single project to test the relevance of social structural explanations on major crime control practices over the past three decades in South Korea. By using a variety of official statistics, time-series regressions were used. The level of crime consistently explained most variation in the arrest rates for all four categories of crimes. Prosecutions also seemed to be closely responsive to the level of crime. However, the link between crime and incarceration rates was not found for all categories of crimes. This finding indicates that levels of incarceration could be determined by external factors such as the economic conditions, organizational capacity, and political climates. In addition, economic conditions, which were measured by the unemployment rate, appeared to have a strong relationship to all crime control practices; it was positively and statistically significant for arrest, prosecution and incarceration rates. Political repression was inversely related to all three practices. However, organizational capacity only seemed to affect incarceration rates. Failure or inconsistencies of some of the social contexts in explaining crime control practice in South Korea can be assessed in both methodological and substantive grounds. This underscores the need to develop more solid theoretical arguments and empirical measures for their roles in crime control.     

Product innovation and process innovation in SOEs: evidence from the Chinese transition

This paper offers an analysis of the influence of management behavior on the relationship between factors such as market, governance and resources of a firm, and the choice of the type of technological innovation in Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The authors develop a structural equation model and 12 hypotheses and test the model and hypotheses using a sample of 274 SOEs in China. This study discovers that the choice of innovation types among Chinese SOEs depends on the turbulence in the environment, and on the organizational resources. The key contributions of the study include: testing existing theories of innovation in the context of Chinese SOEs; studying the factors that affect product innovation and process innovation in that context; and demonstrating that market forces and internal governance simultaneously influence SOE innovation.     

Towards a model of effective knowledge transfer within transnationals: The case of Chinese foreign invested enterprises

In this paper Chinese foreign invested enterprises (FIEs) are employed as prototypes to generate a model of how transnationals can transfer both tacit and explicit knowledge between their units as well as between FIEs and the parent organization. We propose that successful intra-organization knowledge transfer depends upon: (1) collective creation of knowledge as intellectual and social capital available throughout the organization; (2) trust-based collaboration among geographically dispersed entities that form the transnational organization; and (3) the willingness and ability of organizational units to use that knowledge. The paper further proposes that organizational knowledge should ideally flow in multiple directions, providing learning opportunities for both investing and host organizations. Implications for transfer of best practices, a specific form of tacit knowledge, are also offered.     

The influence of functional and geographical diversity in collaboration on product innovation performance in SMEs

Collaboration in innovation is considered an effective strategy to overcome barriers to innovate in SMEs. However, resource constraints and risk of knowledge leakage force management in SMEs to be selective with whom and where to collaborate. Still little is known about interactions between types of partners and their geographical location. This paper sheds new light on the relation between functional and geographical diversity in innovation partners and new-to-the-market and new-to-the-firm innovation performance in SMEs. Using data from two waves (2008 and 2010) of the Community Innovation Survey for Belgium, a positive relation is found between market partners and innovation new-to-the-firm, and between science and global partners and innovation new-to-the-market. A larger diversity in type and in geographical spread of partners is found to be positively associated with innovation new-to-the-market. Cooperation with a diverse set of market partners enhances new-to-the-firm innovation. More diversity in science partners enhances the balance between new-to-the-firm and new-to-the-market innovation. Diversity among international partners enhances new-to-the-firm and new-to-the-market innovation, but not the balance between both. A cooperation strategy balancing functional with geographical partner diversity enhances the balance between new-to-the-firm versus new-to-the-market innovation.     

University knowledge and firm innovation: evidence from European countries

In recent decades, firms have intensified the exploration of external sources of knowledge to enhance their innovation capabilities. This paper presents an empirical analysis of the factors that affect the importance of academic knowledge for firms’ innovation activities. An integrated approach that simultaneously considers country- and firm-level factors is adopted. Regarding the former factors, the analysis shows that the entrepreneurial orientation of university and the quality of academic research increase the importance of knowledge transfers from universities to firms. This suggests that the environmental and institutional context contributes to cross-national disparities in university-industry interactions and the effectiveness of knowledge transfer. In regard to the latter factors, the results indicate that firms oriented toward open search strategies and radical innovations are more likely to draw knowledge from universities. Furthermore, firms belonging to high technology sectors and firms with high absorptive capacity place greater value on the various links with universities. With respect to firm size, the estimates show an inverted U-shaped relation with the importance of universities as a source of knowledge.     

Slack resources,exploratory and exploitative innovation and the performance of small technology-based firms at incubators

This paper aims to contribute (1) to the understanding about how small technology-based firms in spite of being constrained by limited resources, can still perform exploratory and exploitative innovation and (2) to extend knowledge about the role of slack resources in the context of small technology-based firms in facilitating those innovation activities. Herein, we focus on two types of slack resources: internal slack, resources that are available within the firms and external slack, additional resources that are gathered through the facilitation of external sources such as business incubators. Using a sample of 141 small technology-based firms located at incubators, this study combined two streams of research on incubator studies and innovation to construct some hypotheses examining the role of slack resources and innovation activities in enhancing the performance of small technology-based firms operating in incubator setting. Our findings demonstrate that neither slack resources nor innovation activities alone explain firm performance. Instead, small technology-based firms fit their innovation activities to their slack resources. While the relationship between internal slack and performance is mediated by exploitative innovation, exploratory innovation plays a role as a mediator for the relationship between external slack and performance.