The impact of external knowledge sourcing on innovation outcomes in rural and urban businesses in the U.S.

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between external knowledge sourcing and a diverse set of innovation outcomes in rural and urban establishments in the U.S. Existing studies in the broader knowledge management literature principally examine firms in a single industry, overwhelmingly rely on patent data to proxy for innovation, and cannot account for the innovations of businesses in rural American markets. By addressing these limitations using data from the 2014 Rural Establishment Innovation Survey of the USDA's Economic Research Service, this research provides novel insights into how externally acquired knowledge by American establishments may support innovation. Results of the analysis suggest that external knowledge sourcing may specifically promote product, process, and green innovation in U.S. firms. While collective results when external sources of information are divided by industry orientation fail to show that sources outside of a firm's industry play a dominant role in the innovation processes of American establishments in general, findings provide evidence for an outsized impact of these relationships within rural establishments specifically and suggest that external knowledge sourcing from extra‐industry organizations is most critical for promoting successful innovation in rural firms. Results additionally indicate that knowledge sourcing from non‐local organizations may be more important for supporting innovation in rural compared to urban markets.

Indirect effect of extra-industry network and innovativeness on performance through proactiveness

“…Previous studies that examined the external social capital as an intangible resource have emphasized the positive effects of bridging ties with external organizations and performance (Perry-Smith and Shalley, 2003; Stam and Elfring, 2008; Jalali et al , 2017). Besides, extra-industry network is defined as the extent to which a firm establishes bonds outside the central industry network (Geletkanycz and Hambrick, 1997), typically with organizations from other fields (Dotzel and Faggian, 2019; Banerjee, 2021). Among the different dimensions of social capital, the role of the extra-industry network on firm performance is examined in the current study.…”

The Effect of External Knowledge Sources on Organizational Innovation in Small and Medium Enterprises in Germany

“…It is also notable that sourced knowledge from competitors, suppliers, and public research institutes is limited to product innovation (Tsai, 2009;Spithoven et al, 2013;Köhler et al, 2012). Also, most scholars focused on external sources impact in general on technological innovation i.e., radical or incremental innovation (Wang and Xu, 2018;Zouaghi et al, 2018) and technology innovation performance (Kang and Kang, 2009) and new product development (Santoro et al, 2018a;Iglesias-Sánchez et al, 2019) and product and process innovation (Dotzel and Faggian, 2019;Criscuolo et al, 2018).…”

Are the problem spaces of economic actors increasingly virtual? What geo-located web activity might tell us about economic dynamism

“…In contrast, data to examine how information and knowledge from non-local sources might affect economic dynamism are quite rare. Primary data collection to study where businesses get their information finds that local sources are not always the most valuable [ 6 ], consistent with Marshall’s conjecture that information from global production would displace information from local production as the cost of communication declines [ 5 ].…”