All for One and One for All: How Intrafirm Networks Affect the Speed of Knowledge Recombination

Abstract

Drawing on absorptive capacity and social network theory, we examine the effect of intrafirm network closure, tie strength, and diversity on firms? recombination speed of technologically distant external knowledge. Results from an event history study of 113 pharmaceutical firms, which engage in technology licensing in the period 1986-2003, reveal that the time to recombine external knowledge into own invention increases with technological distance. However, intrafirm co-invention network closure and diversity shorten the time to recombine distant external knowledge. These results mark the importance of inventors? knowledge networks as antecedent of the speed with which firms can absorb external knowledge.

Knowledge management, intellectual capital, structural holes, economic complexity and national prosperity

“…have the ability for any network participant to reach many other participants due to the size (number of participants) in the network. This size provides scale (Ahuja, 2000), speed (Moreira and Markus, 2013), complementarity (Richardson, 1972;Arora and Gambardella, 1990;Richardson, 2003;von Raesfeld et al, 2012;Broekel and Brachert, 2015), and knowledge sharing (Berg et al, 1982).…”