Knowledge management and innovation in knowledge-based and high-tech industrialmarkets: The role of openness and absorptive capacity

Abstract

Knowledge, as resource, and technological innovation, as a dynamic capability, are key sources for firm's sustained competitive advantage and survival in knowledge-based and high-tech industries. Under this rationale has emerged a research stream where knowledge management, organizational learning, or intellectual capital, help to understand and constitute the key pieces of one of the most complex business phenomena; the ‘firm's technological advantage’. This being so, it is also true that in knowledge-based and high-tech industrial markets, competitive success comes directly from continuous technological innovations, where a single organization cannot successfully innovate in isolation; therefore, firms should rely on external relationships and networks in order to complement its knowledge domains, and then, develop better and faster innovations. In this sense, I would like to highlight the cross-fertilizing role of three constructs that are nurtured by different research traditions: ‘collaborative/open innovation’, from Strategy and Innovation Management research; ‘absorptive capacity’, from‘A Knowledge-Based View’; and ‘market orientation’, from Marketing research.