Knowledge diversity as a moderator: inter-firm relationships, R&D investment and absorptive capacity

Abstract

The study examines how knowledge diversity moderates the effects of R&D investment, strategic alliances, and acquisitions on firm performance using a sample of 2404 firm-year data from US technology firms. Results confirm that the main effect of knowledge diversity on firm growth is not significant and it indeed plays a role of a moderator. The theory of absorptive capacity provides a good explanation that for firms with high knowledge diversity, strategic alliances and acquisitions are more effective while for firms with low knowledge diversity, internal R&D investment is more effective. These findings point to an important research direct that the characteristics of a firm's knowledge portfolio play a critical role in determining the effectiveness of knowledge sourcing as well as interfirm partnership strategies.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 31 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.