The firm’s ability to learn and create new knowledge is a crucial element for its performance. The notion that firms need to constantly renew and reconfigure its resources is articulated in Teece et al.’s (1997: 516) concept of dynamic capabilities, defined as “the firm’s ability to integrate, build and reconfigure internal and external competencies to address rapidly changing environments”. Th...

Inter-firm cooperation has gained importance in the context of buyer-supplier relationships. Trading partners often build inter-firm relationships to combine valuable resources and knowledge in order to achieve superior long-term performance. Inter-firm relationships require trading partners make relation-specific investments and build initiatives that facilitate and maintain buyer-suppler coop...

Electronic business (e-business) presents several new opportunities and challenges to business organizations through the expansion and enhancements of their markets. However, competing in global electronic markets (e-markets) has forced organizations to continually invest in information technology (IT). Although IT can provide a competitive advantage, its edge is only temporary and lost as comp...

This study explores the influence of partner-specific absorptive capacity as a self-reinforcing mechanism in the context of the theory of path dependence. For this purpose, theoretical foundations of path dependence and absorptive capacity are reviewed. Following, a path model of partner-specific absorptive capacity for business-to-business relationships is developed. While this paper concentra...

This paper focuses on the role of absorptive capacity in determining whether or not domestic firms benefit from productivity spillovers from FDI using establishment level data for the UK. We allow for different effects of FDI on establishments located at different quantiles of the productivity distribution by using conditional quantile regression. Overall, while there is some heterogeneity in r...