Managing the dynamic change of organizational knowledge base in collaboration networks

Abstract

PurposePrevious studies have addressed the importance of knowledge base and its effect on innovation outputs. However, few studies have focused on the antecedents of dynamic changes of the organizational knowledge base. This study aims to shed light on the antecedents of dynamic change of the organizational knowledge base by examining how network centrality in an organization's collaboration network impacts this change and the moderating role of knowledge network cohesion.Design/methodology/approachThe empirical setting of this study is the smartphone collaboration network. The authors selected patent data from the Derwent Innovation Database. A negative binomial model was used to test the hypotheses.FindingsThe results verified that network centrality has a positive effect on the change in coupling among existing knowledge domains and has an inverted U-shaped relationship with the coupling between new and existing knowledge domains. Furthermore, when local cohesion is high, network centrality has a stronger positive effect on the change in coupling among existing knowledge domains. Global cohesion moderates this process in such a way that when it is at a high level, the coupling between new and existing knowledge domains can benefit more from a moderate level of network centrality.Originality/valueThis study sheds light on the antecedents of dynamic change of the organizational knowledge base and links the literature on collaboration and knowledge networks by providing novel insights to match collaboration network centrality with knowledge network cohesion for successful improvement of the organizational knowledge base.