This paper presents an interim report on research into design capacity. Design capacity is defined as an organisation’s proficiency to gather and assimilate knowledge about design. For small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in the UK’s furniture manufacturing sector, the management of design capacity is now viewed as being an integral element in business success. Key product development issu...

Acknowledgement. We thank the management and employees of the three research sites for their cooperation, and An analysis of knowledge spillovers within marketing departments This paper investigates how marketing professionals' intra-departmental social network is associated with their knowledge about customers, competitors, and technology. There are three findings. First, we find no consistent...

Absorptive capacity is one of the factors that determines the success of technology transfer. It improves one’s ability to assess the current and future needs of firms and leads them to make better choices. At the same time, quality movement in firms also has a similar vision; to make firms move forward in a competitive way. The objective of this paper is twofold. First, was to determine the as...

Notions of open innovation, and increasing empirical evidence, suggest the importance of boundary spanning links to firms’ innovation; while discussion of absorptive capacity has stressed the complementary importance of firms’ internal capabilities. Something of a gap exists, however, in our understanding of the specific pathways through which knowledge from different sources, enabled by aspect...

This paper seeks to broaden our understanding of the concept underlying absorptive capacity at the macro –level, paying particular attention to the growth and development perspectives. We provide definitions of absorptive and technological capacity, external technology flows, productivity growth, employment creation and their interrelations. We then analyse the elements of absorptive capability...

Recent years have witnessed a change in firms’ innovation patterns, from closed to open, in which information technology (IT) has played an important role. This paper aims to open up the black box of ITenabled absorptive capacity by theorizing and testing the role of IT in two organizational learning processes, which are either interactive with partners in the knowledge alliance or non-interact...

The lack of understanding on how to successfully deliver knowledge across boundaries in global offshoring projects, and on why the vendors cannot fully absorb the knowledge delivered from clients, is a gap in the existing literature that may account for the inefficient mechanisms used to deliver knowledge by clients and the shift of project management strategy from total outsourcing to global t...