The purpose of this article is to analyse the role of social capital within academic research teams and its influence on knowledge sharing. An empirical study was carried out with 87 academic research teams at a Spanish university. The results show that internal ties have a positive effect on trust. Moreover, the results also reflect that both dimensions of social capital (internal ties and trust) have a positive and significant effect on research teams' knowledge sharing. Therefore, the findings reveal that the network's structure has a positive influence on the quality of relationships among academic researchers that favour knowledge sharing.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to study the external sources of knowledge that better exploit internal knowledge in order to innovate.
Design/methodology/approach
– A balanced panel of 1,266 firms that respond to the Survey of Business Strategies for a five-year period was used, which represents a total of 6,330 observations.
Findings
– The influence of the absorptive capacity on new products is significant, with an inverted U-shaped relationship. The interaction between external sources of knowledge and firm
'
s absorptive capacity has a negative effect on innovation up to a certain level (substitution effect), after which that interaction improves the innovation of firms, displaying a complementary effect.
Practical implications
– Firms with excess of internal sources of knowledge do not obtain better innovative results because overtime firms tend to inertia and need external sources of knowledge to obtain new knowledge. Firms must be conscious that the effect on innovation of using a strategy of external knowledge acquisition could be different depending on their internal knowledge base level. Thus, those firms that select their strategies to combine knowledge appropriately will have better results.
Originality/value
– This paper reveals that the positive effect of internal sources of knowledge on innovation decline after it reaches a high level because those firms with strong absorptive capacity may enter a state of organizational inertia that reduces their innovation. This research enhances the importance of identifying each of the external knowledge sources likely to be used, since their influence on innovation differs depending on the level of internal knowledge. Finally, this study is based on panel data models, which allows us to control unobservable heterogeneity improving earlier studies that had to rely on cross-sectional data.
The objective of this paper is to analyse how the job‐related diversity in academic research teams influences their scientific performance. To achieve that objective, an empirical study of a university's research teams was carried out during the years 2006–2009. The results reflect a non‐significant effect of functional diversity on research teams' performance, whereas status diversity affects in a positive and significant way. However, educational diversity has a significant negative impact when a certain threshold is exceeded. The effect of institutional diversity presents an inverted U‐shaped relation with the number of published articles by the research teams. The results reveal that the relationship between diversity and research performance may not be a simple and direct one because its effect could depend on the organisational context and the type of diversity attributes.
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