Much of the prior research on interorganizational learning has focused on the role of absorptive capacity, a firm's ability to value, assimilate, and utilize new external knowledge. However, this definition of the construct suggests that a firm has an equal capacity to learn from all other organizations. We reconceptualize the firm-level construct absorptive capacity as a learning dyad-level construct, relative absorptive capacity. One firm's ability to learn from another firm is argued to depend on the similarity of both firms' (1) knowledge bases, (2) organizational structures and compensation policies, and (3) dominant logics. We then test the model using a sample of pharmaceutical–biotechnology R&D alliances. As predicted, the similarity of the partners' basic knowledge, lower management formalization, research centralization, compensation practices, and research communities were positively related to interorganizational learning. The relative absorptive capacity measures are also shown to have greater explanatory power than the established measure of absorptive capacity, R&D spending. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Relative absorptive capacity and interorganizational learning

When firms recruit inventors, they acquire not only the use of their skills but also enhanced access to their stock of ideas. But do hiring firms actually increase their use of the new recruits' prior inventions? Our estimates suggest they do, quite significantly in fact, by approximately 202% on average. However, this does not necessarily reflect widespread "learning-by-hiring." In fact, we estimate that a recruit's exploitation of her own prior ideas accounts for almost half of the above effect. Furthermore, although one might expect the recruit's role to diminish rapidly as her tacit knowledge diffuses across her new firm, our estimates indicate that her importance is surprisingly persistent over time. We base these findings on an empirical strategy that exploits the variation over time in hiring firms' citations to the recruits' pre-move patents. Specifically, we employ a difference-in-differences approach to compare pre-move versus post-move citation rates for the recruits' prior patents and the corresponding matched-pair control patents. Our methodology has three benefits compared to previous studies that also examine the link between labor mobility and knowledge flow: 1) it does not suffer from the upward bias inherent in the conventional cross-sectional comparison, 2) it generates results that are robust to a more stringently matched control sample, and 3) it enables a temporal examination of knowledge flow patterns.

Recruiting for Ideas: How Firms Exploit the Prior Inventions of New Hires

Understanding whether technical change is beneficial or detrimental for employment is at the center of the policy debate, especially in phases of economic recession. So far, the effects of innovation in its manifold declinations and intrinsic complexity on labour demand have proven to be not unequivocal. This essay critically reviews the role of technical change in shaping employment dynamics at different levels of aggregation. Firstly, it disentangles theoretically the role of different compensation mechanisms through which employment adjusts after an innovation is introduced. Secondly, it critically presents the most recent empirical evidence on the topic, with a focus on methods and limitations. Finally, it provides an attempt to conceptualize a number of stylized facts and empirical regularities on the innovation-employment nexus.

The Innovation-Employment nexus: a critical survey of theory and empirics

There is a growing research interest in the relationship between the composition of regional knowledge bases and the extra-regional collaborative ties maintained by actors during their development work. To investigate this relationship, we use patent data to characterize European NUTS 3 regions by their (i) comparative technological specializations; and (ii) related technological variety. We find domestic, extra-regional collaboration to be negatively associated with regional technological specialization and related technological variety. At the same time, we find related technological variety to serve in support of international innovation collaboration.

Does the composition of regional knowledge bases influence extra-regional collaboration for innovation?

This article investigates the microeconomics of employment dynamics, using a Chinese manufacturing firm-level data set over the period 1998-2007 It does so in the light of a scheme of "circular and cumulative causation," whereby firms' heterogeneous productivity gains, sales dynamics and innovation activities ultimately shape the patterns of employment dynamics Using firm's productivity growth as a proxy for process innovation, our results show that the latter correlates negatively with firm-level employment growth Conversely, relative productivity levels, as such a general proxy for the broad technological advantages/disadvantages of each firm, do show positive effect on employment growth in the long-run through replicator-type dynamics Moreover, firm-level demand dynamics play a significant role in driving employment growth, which more than compensate the labor-saving effect due to technological progress Finally, and somewhat puzzlingly, the direct effects of product innovation and patenting activities on employment growth appear to be negligible © The Author(s) 2018 Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Associazione ICC All rights reserved

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/174577/1/2017-27.pdf

Technological catching-up, sales dynamics, and employment growth: evidence from China’s manufacturing

This paper explores how the innovation strategies of firms reflect the density, diversity and connectivity of their urban locations. Firms located outside the four large-city regions of Norway are generally more committed to development work than are their urban counterparts. Still, once engaged, firms in certain large-city locations exhibit unique preferences towards geographically dispersed collaboration that are most pronounced within the Western business district of the Capital. This shows that firm-level decisions along interconnected activity dimensions must be considered in order for different strategy choices, and the interdependencies between them that are an essential feature of urban economies, are to be revealed. The study provides new insights into the large-city region knowledge dynamics that are increasingly important to human capital formation, employment and growth.

Imitate, or innovate and collaborate? On innovation strategy choices in the urban economy

Using Norwegian Community Innovation Survey (CIS) data linked to public employment registers covering the years 2004 - 2010, this paper investigates the relationship between employment growth prior to the event of innovation, innovation output, and growth performance after the event. Positive growth ex ante generally strengthens growth ex post. Moreover, it increases the likelihood that innovations are introduced during the intermediate period that strengthen employment performances further. This effect is present for all levels of growth only when new products, production processes and support functions are introduced in tandem. Standalone improvements of products, by contrast, influence only the probability of survival, whereas standalone improvements of production processes and support functions support ex post growth specifically in the upper tail of the distribution. Our findings challenge the common view that product innovations are more important to growth than process innovations, and reveal interdependencies between multi-faceted organizational capabilities, innovation output and employment performance.

Nifu Nordic

Papers

Imitate, or innovate and collaborate? On innovation strategy choices in the urban economy

Innovation and corporate employment growth revisited