Organizational Learning, Social Capital and Technology Transfer: An Empirical Study on Firms Participating R&D Consortia
Author
Abstract
It is now widely recognized that, to survive and thrive in competitive environments, firms must keep upgrading their core technologies. In contrast to develop the core technology internally, acquiring the technology externally is a fast, low-risk and effective way. To sustain their competitive advantage, firms must seek cooperative relationships with other firms to acquire the critical technologies rather than only purchase the standardized technologies or patents from market. Transferring technology externally from joint ventures, strategic alliances, or R&D consortia, is particularly significant for the Taiwanese small-medium enterprises as they have been upgrading from OEM to ODM or even to OBM.
There has been a growing body of research focusing on technology transfer for decades. However, some fundamental questions of technology transfer require more attention. First, social capital is an important perspective in explaining the technology transfer and knowledge acquiring from R&D collaboration because of the tacitness and distinctness characteristics of technology and knowledge. Secondly, most prior studies have focused on the dyadic relationship between firm and research institution, but ignored the effects of position of an individual firm in the network. Although firms can facilitate the technology transfer by developing relationships with other partners in strategic R&D networks, firms must also have effective organizational learning to secure and exploit the technology they have acquired.
In other words, firms first can leverage interorganizational relationships to obtain the critical resource through network learning and then improve performance of technology transfer. In addition, firms have to construct effective organizational learning internally to internalize the acquired knowledge from external networks. In attempting to explore the process and performance of technology transfer in R&D consortia, we integrate the social capital and organizational learning issues to examine their effects on technology transfer while social capital refers to firms' external capability and organizational learning refers to firms' internal capability. Our research questions include: 1) How does firms' social capital with external partners in R&D consortium affect performance of technology transfer? 2) How does firms' internal capability of organizational learning affect performance of technology transfer? And 3) Are the effects of social capital and the organizational learning on the performance of technology transfer complementary?
Based on an empirical investigation on 110 firms participating ITRI-sponsored R&D consortia, we find: 1) Firms capabilities of organizational learning, including learning intent, absorptivity and knowledge integration capability, have positive effects on performance of technology transfer. 2) Among the concepts of social capital, only centrality has positive effects on market advantage of technology transfer, and number of linkage, relationship quality and shared norm within network have positive effects on technology advantage. 3) Some concepts of organizational learning and social capital have complementary effects on technology transfer performance. For examples, firms with central position in network and better relationship quality can facilitate the technology transfer performance if they also have stronger intent and aborptivity. In additions, firms with more linkage and stronger relationship have better technology advantage if their learning intent and aborptivity are stronger. 4) Firms with long-term interaction ITRI have better technology advantage of technology transfer and on the other hand, firms with social capital developed mainly from the interaction with other partners participating the same consortium, have better market performance.
Theoretically, we first conclude that firms, to sustain competitive advantage, must not only leverage the external interorganizational relationships, but also improve their organizational learning internally. Secondly, we argue social relationships can be capital and liability as well. Firms have to evaluate the appropriateness and effectiveness of constructing social capital as it is costly and oversociallized is inefficient. Lastly, the effects of external social capital and internal organizational learning on technology transfer are complementary rather than substitute.
We present some suggestions for practice. First, organizational learning capability is the fundamental issue of technology transfer While evaluating whether and how to develop social capital, firms have to improve their organizational learning by optimizing the resource allocations due to the availability of resources and some constraints. It takes long time for firms to construct social capital and the benefits are not immediate. Furthermore, it is beneficial for firms to keep long-term relationship with ITRI.
The first contribution of this study is combining the network perspective and organizational learning to understand the cooperation between firms and research institutions. It is an important issue for firms to leverage external relationships and strengthen internal organizational learning as well in this co-opetitive environment. Most prior studies have focused on the dyad relationship between firm and firm, or firm and research institution. We, adopting the network embeddeness perspective, explicate firms' strategic role in network and distinguish the relationships between ”firm and firm” and ”firm and research institution.”
Key Words
Organizational learning; Social capital; Technology transfer; R&D consortia
