Digital technology adoption and knowledge flows within firms: Can the Internet overcome geographic and technological distance?
Digital technology adoption and knowledge flows within firms: Can the Internet overcome geographic and technological distance?
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DOI：
10.1016/j.respol.2018.10.021
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发表时间：
2019-10-01
期刊：
影响因子：
7.2
通讯作者：
van Zeebroeck, Nicolas
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Forman, Chris;van Zeebroeck, Nicolas
在什么条件下，数字技术的采用会增加企业内部的跨地点知识流动？我们调查这个问题，通过研究的影响，采用基本的互联网接入跨位置的知识流在同一家公司。我们构建了一个大型数据集的互联网采用和专利引用的二元对公司位置之间的1992-1998年。我们发现，当两个位置在对采用基本的互联网有一个引用和（潜在的）引用位置之间的引用的可能性增加。相比之下，我们发现只有在引用位置的互联网采用没有显着的效果。我们进一步研究了这种影响如何根据研究活动之间的知识和专业化的研究活动在收件人的来源和收件人之间的接近程度而变化。我们发现，当两人在类似的研究领域工作时，以及当引用位置的研究领域不那么专业化时，引用的可能性会增加。这些结果对一系列稳健性分析来说是稳健的，表明互联网连接等数字技术只有在共享共同知识库的情况下才能够促进地点之间的知识流动。
Under what conditions does digital technology adoption increase cross location knowledge flows within firms? We investigate this question by studying the impact of adopting basic Internet access on cross-location knowledge flows within the same firm. We construct a large data set of Internet adoption and patent citations among dyadic pairs of firm-locations between 1992-1998. We find that when both locations in the pair adopt basic Internet there is an increase in the likelihood of a citation between the citing and (potential) cited location. In contrast, we find no significant effect of Internet adoption at only the citing location. We further study how this effect varies according to the proximity of the research activities between the source and recipient of knowledge and specialization of the research activities within the recipient. We find that the likelihood of a citation increases more after dyadic Internet adoption when the pair is working in similar research areas and when the research areas in the citing location are less specialized. These results, which are robust to a range of robustness analyses, suggest that digital technologies such as Internet connectivity are able to facilitate knowledge flows between locations only when they share a common knowledge base.