The evolution of inter-organisational social capital with foreign customers: Its direct and interactive effects on SMEs’ foreign performance

Distance to Customers, Absorptive Capacity, and Innovation in High‐Tech Firms: The Dark Face of Geographical Proximity

“…This idea is very much in line with what specifically happens in our empirical setting, where high-tech firms require primary exploration activities to capture new ideas and improvements beyond the exploitation of the elements/resources/products they already have. These exploration activities are likely to be much better developed with distant rather than close partners, thanks to the diverse information and knowledge that can be accessed and combined (Gilsing et al, 2008;Hendry and Brown 2006;Hoppmann et al 2013;Presutti, Boari, and Fratocchi 2007). Accordingly, our findings provide further support to the idea that diversity in accessed and combined information and knowledge could be much more important than a pure source (Burt 2004).…”

“…A large set of managerial implications arises from this study. Cluster firms should actively develop relationships with distant customers to favor knowledge acquisition useful to innovative performance (Presutti, Boari, and Fratocchi 2016). Firms must select those distant customers who can act as bridges to enable a local firm to enlarge its knowledge sources and innovation ideas.…”

Pursuing Innovation: An Investigation of the Foreign Business Relationships of Swedish SMEs*

“…Since we investigate international SMEs that have already taken their first step abroad, our findings provide insight into how SMEs are able to remain innovative and stay competitive throughout their subsequent expansion abroad. Our results highlight that a crucial consideration for SMEs is adopting a strategic inclination, which involves investments in business relationships (Presutti, Boari and Fratocchi, ). In support of prior studies, we find that such investments can create avenues for external resources that enable companies to see new opportunities and leverage those for innovation (Hånell, Nordman and Tolstoy, ).…”

The structural, relational and cognitive dimensions of social capital on innovation and technology in interorganizational and intraorganizational settings

“…The second main area is concerning the development of interorganizational social capital (Inkpen and Tsang 2005;Sorenson and Rogan 2014), that is, outside organizational boundaries. Recent findings account to social capital the improvement in organizational and alliance performance (Gulati, Lavie and Madhavan 2011;Malik 2012), knowledge transfer and innovation (Filieri et al 2014;Ivančič, Podmenik and Hafner 2014;Davis 2016), and internationalization (Presutti, Boari and Fratocchi 2016).…”