Knowledge convergence and organization innovation: the moderating role of relational embeddedness
- PDF / 818,182 Bytes
- 23 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 21 Downloads / 214 Views
Knowledge convergence and organization innovation: the moderating role of relational embeddedness Na Liu1 · Jianqi Mao1 · Jiancheng Guan2 Received: 4 December 2018 © Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2020
Abstract Knowledge convergence is an important means of innovation. The study aims to explore how knowledge convergence influences innovation performance at an organizational level. Furthermore, we address the moderating role of network relational embeddedness on the innovation deriving from knowledge convergence. Our empirical analyses adopting negative binomial regression models employ patent counts and patent citations from the nanotechnology field. The findings reveal that the scientific intensity in the convergence between scientific knowledge and technological knowledge has an inverted U-shaped influence on innovation performance and that this association is flattened in organizations with high network relational diversity. Also, we find that the technological scope in convergence of technological knowledge self has an inverted U-shaped influence on innovation performance and that this association is steepened in organizations with high network relational strength. Our findings add understandings of knowledge convergence on organization innovation and also have important practical and political implications. Keywords Patent · Knowledge convergence · Innovation performance · Relational diversity · Relational strength · Collaborative network
Introduction Convergence is a very common phenomenon in today’s innovation and takes place in innovation system involving the levels of knowledge, product, service and even business function (Curran and Leker 2011; Liu et al. 2017). Rosenberg (1963) firstly proposed the concept of convergence by explored the convergence phenomenon of mechanical instrument technologies. Since then, scholars have carried out explorations on convergence at different levels. We focus on convergence at the knowledge level in this study for two reasons. First, whether the industrial convergence, product/service convergence or business function * Jiancheng Guan [email protected]; [email protected] 1
School of Business Administration, Shandong Technology and Business University, Yantai 264005, China
2
School of Economics and Management, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Scientometrics
convergence, they all root in knowledge convergence (Curran and Leker 2011). Knowledge convergence, as the starting point of convergence, increasingly attracts attention of scholars, social workers and policy makers (Jeong and Lee 2015; Athreye and Keeble 2000). Moreover, knowledge development is increasingly characterized by interdisciplinary and cross-boundary, whose deep mechanism is exactly knowledge convergence that is bring more and more innovations, surprises and challenges to us. Knowledge convergence is a critical means to create innovative outputs by combining and applying knowledge from different technological fields or knowledge
Data Loading...
