Origins of knowledge and innovation in R&D alliances: a contingency approach

Abstract

Innovative performance is influenced both by the origins of the existing knowledge that is combined to generate innovation and by how economic actors search for new knowledge. Drawing on a sample of inter-firm dyadic R&D alliances, we found that whereas the integration of geographically distant knowledge and of organisationally proximate knowledge in R&D alliances are negatively related to the alliance innovative performance, search span positively moderates both relationships. We conclude that, in order to make the most of broad-span searching, firms participating in R&D alliances should integrate geographically distant but organisationally proximate knowledge. By doing so, firms take advantage of the diversity and novelty that characterises geographically distant knowledge, while preserving considerable levels of relative absorptive capacity that are needed for them to understand, internalise, and effectively use partners’ knowledge from different domains.

Keywords:

• Interorganisational knowledge-intensive collaboration
• innovation performance
• search span
• joint patents

Acknowledgements

We thank Dovev Lavie for useful suggestions. Earlier versions of this study were presented at the 2009 DRUID Society Conference, 17–19 June, Copenhagen, and at a Research Seminar at the University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE-IUL), Business Research Unit, 8 February 2013, Lisbon.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Antonio Capaldo is Associate Professor of Strategic Management at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan and Rome (Italy), S.E.GEST.A. Department of Management. He earned his Ph.D. in Strategy and Organization from the University of Bologna and has been a Visiting Research Fellow at Warwick Business School (UK). Dr. Capaldo's research interests include innovation management, strategic alliances and networks, and the processes of interorganisational collaboration. He also researches in design management, supply chain issues, and cross-cultural management. He has published extensively on these topics in various academic journals including Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Management, European Management Review, Industrial Marketing Management, Scandinavian Journal of Management, and The Global Community.

Antonio Messeni Petruzzelli is Lecturer in Innovation Management at Politecnico di Bari (Italy) and co-founder of the Innovation Management Group. He holds a Ph.D. in Management from the Politecnico di Bari and has been a visiting scholar at IESE Business School. His research interests concern innovation management, including themes such as knowledge creation and transfer, interorganisational relationships, and system dynamics modeling. In these topics he has published several articles on international journals and presented papers at international conferences.

Notes

1. Note that the effect of search span on the dependent variable is inverted U-shaped. In an analysis not reported here, we also tested the quadratic terms of both our independent variables (i.e. GeoDistKnowledge² and OrgProxKnowledge²), as well as their interaction terms with the quadratic term of search span (i.e. GeoDistKnowledge²XSearchSpan² and OrgProxKnowledge²XSearchSpan²). In all these cases, the results turned out to be not statistically significant.

2. We thank an anonymous reviewer for having encouraged us to read our findings under the lens of the open innovation literature and for his/her useful suggestions.