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Author(s):  
Yinglei Wang ◽  
Darren Meister ◽  
Peter H. Gray

The way individuals use internal and external knowledge sources influences organizational knowledge integration, an important source of competitive advantage. Drawing on research into knowledge sourcing and consumer switching behavior, the authors develop an integrated model to understand individuals’ choices between internal and external knowledge sources in contemporary work settings, where information technology has made both easily accessible. A test of the model using survey data collected from an international consulting firm yields an important new insight: satisfied individuals in knowledge reuse friendly environments are likely to use internal knowledge sources while they may also be tempted by easily accessible external knowledge sources. The implications for researchers and practitioners are also discussed.

2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yinglei Wang ◽  
Darren Meister ◽  
Peter H. Gray

The way individuals use internal and external knowledge sources influences organizational knowledge integration, an important source of competitive advantage. Drawing on research into knowledge sourcing and consumer switching behavior, the authors develop an integrated model to understand individuals’ choices between internal and external knowledge sources in contemporary work settings, where information technology has made both easily accessible. A test of the model using survey data collected from an international consulting firm yields an important new insight: satisfied individuals in knowledge reuse friendly environments are likely to use internal knowledge sources while they may also be tempted by easily accessible external knowledge sources. The implications for researchers and practitioners are also discussed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (7) ◽  
pp. 1789-1805 ◽  
Author(s):  
Su-Ming Wu ◽  
Xiu-Hao Ding

PurposeInformation technology plays a critical role in the open innovation process. The purpose of this study is to explore the inner mechanism of external information technology (IT) capability that affects open innovation performance.Design/methodology/approachIn this paper, responses to 232 questionnaires from different firms were collected in China. Then, the proposed hypotheses were tested using regression analysis by statistical product and service solutions (SPSS).FindingsThe results indicate that external knowledge integration plays a mediating role in the relationship between external IT capability and open innovation performance, openness breadth positively moderates the influence of external IT capability on external knowledge integration and openness depth negatively moderates the relationship between external IT capability and external knowledge integration.Practical implicationsThe results, which are based on Chinese responses, provide useful suggestions for firms in China. To use external IT capability to improve open innovation performance, firms should not only stress the role of external knowledge integration but also consider their search strategy.Originality/valueBoth researchers and practitioners are interested in the relationship between information technology and open innovation. However, the way in which the inner mechanism of external IT capability affects open innovation performance has not been thoroughly researched. Based on knowledge integration theory, the authors construct a model that includes external IT capability, external knowledge integration, search strategy and open innovation performance. The results of this paper confirm the mediating and moderating roles of external knowledge integration and search strategy, respectively.


2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Durst ◽  
Ingi Runar Edvardsson ◽  
Guido Bruns

Studies on knowledge creation are limited in general, and there is a particular shortage of research on the topic in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Given the importance of SMEs for the economy and the vital role of knowledge creation in innovation, this situation is unsatisfactory. Accordingly, the purpose of our study is to increase our understanding of how SMEs create new knowledge. Data are obtained through semi-structured interviews with ten managing directors of German SMEs operating in the building and construction industry. The findings demonstrate the influence of external knowledge sources on knowledge creation activities. Even though the managing directors take advantage of different external knowledge sources, they seem to put an emphasis on informed knowledge sources. The study´s findings advance the limited body of knowledge regarding knowledge creation in SMEs.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion A. Weissenberger-Eibl ◽  
Tim Hampel

AbstractWhile external knowledge has the potential to benefit a firm’s innovation activities, research shows that the positive effects of a more open model of innovation do not come naturally. This paper draws on the project level to explore the organizational factors that hamper or impede the integration of external knowledge sourced from an open innovation platform and to suggest interventions to overcome these barriers. While open innovation is mainly discussed as a concept that resides at the level of the organization, this paper draws on the project level to contribute to a multi-level understanding of open innovation and to offer a deeper understanding of the challenges project teams face, when integrating external knowledge. To investigate occurring barriers, four cases of external knowledge integration within a multinational corporation are analyzed. The results show that due to the external nature of the knowledge, an additional effort of project teams is required such as forming alliances with key individuals and changing negative attitudes towards external sources to overcome organizational resistance. Theoretical as well as practical implications are discussed.


2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (6) ◽  
pp. 1523-1539 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Doloreux ◽  
Ekaterina Turkina

Purpose This paper aims to explore the effects of multiple external sources of knowledge and of the use of winemaker consultants on innovation in the Canadian wine industry. Design/methodology/approach The data for the study are taken from an original survey of wine firms in Canada covering the 2007-2009 period. The survey was carried out by computer-assisted telephone interviews, and it was addressed to winery firms that are engaged in growing grapes and producing wine. Findings The results show that the use of winemaker consultants positively affects all forms of innovation. At the same, as far as external knowledge sources are concerned, marketing sources positively affect all types of innovation, while research sources and general sources have a positive influence on particular forms of innovation. The results also show that winemaker consultants interact with other knowledge sources. Nevertheless, there are important nuances with regard to which type of knowledge sources is more compatible with the use of winemaker consultants for which type of innovation. Originality/value To date, there is no empirical evidence of the extent to which the use of external winemaker consultants and external knowledge sources interact together and what are their impacts on the introduction of different forms of innovation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (05) ◽  
pp. 9217-9224
Author(s):  
Tianyi Wang ◽  
Yating Zhang ◽  
Xiaozhong Liu ◽  
Changlong Sun ◽  
Qiong Zhang

Multi-role dialogue understanding comprises a wide range of diverse tasks such as question answering, act classification, dialogue summarization etc. While dialogue corpora are abundantly available, labeled data, for specific learning tasks, can be highly scarce and expensive. In this work, we investigate dialogue context representation learning with various types unsupervised pretraining tasks where the training objectives are given naturally according to the nature of the utterance and the structure of the multi-role conversation. Meanwhile, in order to locate essential information for dialogue summarization/extraction, the pretraining process enables external knowledge integration. The proposed fine-tuned pretraining mechanism is comprehensively evaluated via three different dialogue datasets along with a number of downstream dialogue-mining tasks. Result shows that the proposed pretraining mechanism significantly contributes to all the downstream tasks without discrimination to different encoders.


Author(s):  
Christian Horn ◽  
Marcel Bogers ◽  
Alexander Brem*

Crowdsourcing is an increasingly important phenomenon that is fundamentally changing how companies create and capture value. There are still important questions with respect to how crowdsourcing works and can be applied in practice, especially in business practice. In this chapter, we focus on prediction markets as a mechanism and tool to tap into a crowd in the early stages of an innovation process. The act of opening up to external knowledge sources is also in line with the growing interest in open innovation. One example of a prediction market, a virtual stock market, is applied to open innovation through an online platform. We show that use of mechanisms of internal crowdsourcing with prediction markets can outperform use of external crowds.


2004 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 215-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Gerrard ◽  
J. Barton Cunningham

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