Structural social capital and innovation. Is knowledge transfer the missing link?

Abstract

Purpose-R&D people, business units, and organisations are becoming increasingly involved in collaboration networks to share knowledge and generate innovation more effectively than in the past. The social capital theory has been adopted in several areas of study to explain how individuals, groups, and businesses manage relationships to generate better innovation outputs. However, research has obtained contrasting results about the contribution of distinct structural configurations of social capital to innovation. To shed light on such relationship, the current paper reviews the literature on structural social capital, knowledge types and knowledge transfer processes, and innovation at the interpersonal, inter-unit, and inter-firm levels. Design/methodology/approach-This review has considered studies on social capital in organisational behaviour, strategy, and management over a period of 20 years. Findings-This study emphasises the importance of knowledge transfer processes and of knowledge types as mediators in the relationship between structural social capital and innovation. Moreover, results at the different levels of analysis provide support that seemingly opposite configurations of social capital are complementary to each other (structural holes vs. dense networks, strong vs. weak ties ties). Accordingly, the balance of different configurations of social capital enables the ego to explore, access, assimilate, and combine different knowledge types, which ultimately lead to higher innovation performance. Originality/value-This review enables to understand the mediating role of knowledge transfer processes and knowledge types in the relationship between structural social capital and innovation.

Conceptualising the initiation of researcher and research user partnerships: a meta-narrative review

“…1). The data extracted from each review is available in Additional file 3 [8,9,[30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44].…”

“…The 17 reviews were published between 1998 and 2017. Nine of the 17 reviews were published between 2012 to 2017 [8,9,[30][31][32][33][34][35][36]. Reviews included primary studies published from 1968 to 2015.…”

“…Reviews included primary studies published from 1968 to 2015. Reviews were conducted in the United States (n = 7) [32,33,35,39,41,42,44], Canada (n = 5) [8,9,30,31,37], the United Kingdom (n = 3) [34,38,43], Australia (n = 1) [40], and Uganda (n = 1) [36]. The types of reviews were classified using Paré et al's [27] definitions of systematic (n = 6) [33-35, 37, 38, 43], theoretical (n = 4) [30,39,40,42], narrative (n = 2) [41,44] and critical (n = 2) [31,32] reviews, followed by one each of descriptive [36], realist [8] and scoping [9] reviews.…”

“…Ten reviews emerged from the healthcare literature in the traditions of medicine [33], nursing [35], public health [31,36,37,44] and health services research [8,9,32,43]. Seven reviews emerged from the social sciences literature in the traditions of the study of psychology [30,39], knowledge management [34,40], information systems [38], education [41] and organisational management [42]. Six reviews followed reporting criteria such as the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews [9,33], framework synthesis recommendations [30], integrated review methodology [35], the Joanna Briggs Institute for Evidence Based Nursing and Midwifery's systematic reviews recommendations [37] and the National Health System's Centre for Reviews and Dissemination Recommendations [43] ( Table 1).…”

Development of A Theoretical Framework for the Study of Cluster Networked Agro-Based Processing in Indian Context using Literature Survey

“…Filieri and Alguezaui (2014) have brought out "knowledge transfer" as a mediating variable in the social capital-innovation relationship. They identify that most of the studies acknowledge social capital as an important antecedent of "knowledge transfer".…”