Knowledge searching strategies, testing for complementarities on the innovation behavior of the firm

Alejandro Bello-Pintado (), Felipe Berrutti (), Carlos Bianchi and Pablo Blanchard
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Alejandro Bello-Pintado: Universidad Pública de Navarra (España)
Felipe Berrutti: Universidad de la República (Uruguay). Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y de Administración. Instituto de Economí­a

No 19-18, Documentos de Trabajo (working papers) from Instituto de Economía - IECON

Abstract: According to two basic building blocks of neo-Schumpeterian economics, firms innovation process shows idiosyncratic features related to their specific characteristics of the firm and of the environment where it acts. Moreover, firms innovation is recognized as an interactive process. Hence, due to systemic functioning, it is expected that the effect of two simultaneous external linkages will be different from the sum of their isolated effects. However, the external search for knowledge and information sources (KISs) may present constraints related to the searching costs and the cognitive distance between the firm and the KISs. This paper aims to contribute empirical evidence to revisit these theoretical building blocks by analyzing the search strategies conducted by firms. We identify three types of external KISs and analyze the effects of eight search strategies (KIS combinations) on firms innovation behavior. In addition, we test the complementarity or substitution effects of the simultaneous use of different KISs on the innovation behavior – effort and performance – of Uruguayan firms. We identify the specific effect of different KIS combinations but find no evidence of a linear relation between search scope and innovation behavior. Moreover, we find evidence of complementary effects between relatively closer and more distant KISs and substitution effects between relatively near KISs.

Keywords: information sources; search strategy; complementarity; supermodularity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D22 D83 L25 O32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2019-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-eur, nep-ino, nep-lam, nep-sbm and nep-tid
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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12008/22329

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