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The purpose of this paper is to examine how knowledge inflows and outflows interact to affect performance outcomes. Though previous studies have dealt with knowledge inflows and outflows, the quality and quantity characteristics of knowledge are often not taken into account, thus leaving a research gap with regards to the effect of their interactions on performance outcomes.

Based on Poisson regression analysis, this quantitative study fills the aforementioned research gaps by analyzing the ambidextrous configurations of knowledge flows from an ambidexterity perspective and examines their effects on two-phase performance (i.e. regular season and playoffs), using a longitudinal data set of National Basketball Association transactions from the 2003-2004 to 2014-2015 season.

The results suggest that the complementarity between knowledge inflows and outflows along the quality and quantity dimensions of knowledge, respectively, has a positive impact on two-phase performance, while the imbalance between knowledge inflows and outflows under the quality and quantity dimensions of knowledge, respectively, has a negative impact on playoffs performance (Phase 2). These findings suggest that organizations can balance knowledge inflows and outflows under a single quality or quantity dimension of knowledge. Furthermore, the interaction between the quantity of the inflows of knowledge and the quality of the outflows of knowledge and the interaction between the quality of the inflows of knowledge and the quantity of the outflows of knowledge are both positively related to two-phase performance. These findings suggest that organizations can balance knowledge inflows and outflows across quality and quantity dimensions of knowledge. Finally, the effects of the interaction between knowledge inflows and outflows on playoffs performance are greater than regular-season.

Organizations should leverage ambidexterity to manage/balance knowledge inflows and outflows across quality and quantity dimensions, further enhancing performance outcomes.

This study, first, provides new insights into knowledge flows by distinguishing between the quality and quantity of knowledge, the inflows and outflows of knowledge, constructing ambidextrous configurations of knowledge flows from an ambidexterity perspective. Second, it contributes to the relationship between knowledge flows and organizational performance by revealing how ambidextrous configurations of knowledge flows exert different effects on performance outcomes. Third, it adds to the literature of ambidexterity-performance relationships and expands it to the context of sports.

This empirical study explores knowledge outflows from MNE subsidiaries and its impact on subsidiary performance. We develop hypotheses derived from literature on MNE knowledge flows integrated with an organizational economics perspective on knowledge-creating MNE subsidiaries. The hypotheses are tested using a simultaneous equation model applied to a unique data set encompassing a German MNE, HeidelbergCement. Enablers and impediments of knowledge outflows are assessed to explain why subsidiary managers share their knowledge with other MNE units. Our findings suggest that knowledge outflows increase a subsidiary's performance only up to a certain point and that too much knowledge sharing is detrimental to the contributing subsidiary's performance.

This study aims to address the performance consequences of knowledge transfer within related diversified firms by distinguishing between knowledge outflows and knowledge inflows at the business division level.

Questionnaire data from a sample of 118 business divisions were analyzed using stepwise linear regression.

The results from a three-effect model for the analysis of knowledge transfer indicate that knowledge outflow improves division performance, while knowledge inflow damages it when absorptive capacity is weak. The overall effect of knowledge transfer is therefore beneficial with the exception of the cases of receiving divisions with low levels of absorptive capacity.

These results indicate that knowledge transfer contributes to overall corporate performance, since knowledge outflow impacts positively on division performance in all cases and knowledge inflow impacts negatively on division performance only in some cases. Setting aside the obvious task of promoting knowledge transfer within the firm, one important concern for corporate officers would be to prevent situations in which a division lacks the absorptive capacity to play its role within a corporate network.

This work contributes to existent literature by disentangling the effects of knowledge transfer according to different theoretical perspectives, and it provides an empirical examination in a setting which is intensive in knowledge transference, as is that of business divisions from related diversified firms.

An organization can be understood as a knowledge network in which teams send and receive knowledge. Many studies have explored knowledge sharing across teams but did not consider the direction of knowledge flows (KF), specifically how the knowledge inflow (KIF) and knowledge outflow (KOF) can be induced and influence team activities differently. To fill this gap, this paper distinguishes between KIF and KOF, examines their antecedents and consequences and considers how KIF and KOF within a team moderate the relationship between antecedents and KF of a team.

This study used structural equation model analysis of a sample of 341 individuals within 73 teams from four companies.

The results suggest that IT support is essential because it influences both KIF and KOF. However, only KOF has a significant effect on team performance suggesting that ambidexterity is not always necessary. In promoting KOF, increasing task interdependency is also effective. The effect of IT support varies with the level of KIF diversity.

The findings emphasize the importance of distinguishing KOF from KIF in a team’s knowledge network under the theoretical lens of ambidexterity. Identifying how IT support influences KF and how these flows separately affect team performance can provide useful insights into managing and facilitating KF in an organization.

The purpose of this study is to deal with the performance consequences of business units that adopt varying knowledge roles within the internal multi-business network. Multi-business firms are distributed knowledge systems in which business units are extensively involved in internal knowledge transfer processes. Business units play different roles within their respective corporate knowledge networks as knowledge providers, knowledge receivers, both or neither.

Survey data from a sample of 225 business divisions were analyzed using a multivariate analysis of covariance (ANCOVA).

Results indicate that divisions which occupy knowledge roles that reveal the possession of unique knowledge (knowledge signaling) or guarantee the accumulation of new knowledge (knowledge learning) outperform those divisions that have access to spilled knowledge (knowledge depreciation) or have no access to any kind of knowledge (knowledge insulation).

Four knowledge roles are distinguished according to the extent to which a business division provides the rest of the corporation with knowledge or receives knowledge from the rest of the corporation, thus exploring the issue of internal knowledge transfer from an integrated perspective that takes the directionality of knowledge flows and the position within the knowledge network into account.

This study contributes to existent research on knowledge transfer and performance outcomes by demonstrating the usefulness of the knowledge role as an integrating concept within this literature. It also extends the four-role framework to the prescriptive domain and tests its normative implications in an intensive internal knowledge transfer setting which has to date gone relatively unnoticed, as is that of multi-business firms.

This paper aims to propose a method for better discovering topic evolution path and semantic relationship from the perspective of patent entity extraction and semantic representation. On the one hand, this paper identifies entities that have the same semantics but different expressions for accurate topic evolution path discovery. On the other hand, this paper reveals semantic relationships of topic evolution for better understanding what leads to topic evolution.

Firstly, a Bi-LSTM-CRF (bidirectional long short-term memory with conditional random field) model is designed for patent entity extraction and a representation learning method is constructed for patent entity representation. Secondly, a method based on knowledge outflow and inflow is proposed for discovering topic evolution path, by identifying and computing semantic common entities among topics. Finally, multiple semantic relationships among patent entities are pre-designed according to a specific domain, and then the semantic relationship among topics is identified through the proportion of different types of semantic relationships belonging to each topic.

In the field of UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle), this method identifies semantic common entities which have the same semantics but different expressions. In addition, this method better discovers topic evolution paths by comparison with a traditional method. Finally, this method identifies different semantic relationships among topics, which gives a detailed description for understanding and interpretation of topic evolution. These results prove that the proposed method is effective and useful. Simultaneously, this method is a preliminary study and still needs to be further investigated on other datasets using multiple emerging deep learning methods.

This work provides a new perspective for topic evolution analysis by considering semantic representation of patent entities. The authors design a method for discovering topic evolution paths by considering knowledge flow computed by semantic common entities, which can be easily extended to other patent mining-related tasks. This work is the first attempt to reveal semantic relationships among topics for a precise and detailed description of topic evolution.

With considerable attention paid to the motives and process of idiosyncratic internationalization trajectory of multinationals from emerging economies (EMNCs), little is known on whether, and if so how, new competitive advantages of EMNCs are created and accumulated over time. MNC and EMNC literature agrees on the importance of external and internal knowledge linkages in technological competence creation. By building upon this framework, this paper aims to evaluate EMNCs’ external and internal knowledge flow patterns by benchmarking their counterparts from mature industrialized countries (MMNCs).

This study analyzes US patents granted between 2000 and 2014 to leading innovation-oriented EMNCs from China and India, and their matched MMNCs. Being the first to use the US patent and citation data in studying leading innovation-oriented EMNCs, the authors use a descriptive statistical method.

The findings offer empirical insights of the scale, scope and quality of EMNC technological competence creation. Moreover, in contrast to existing EMNC literature, it is found that EMNC parents have been the most important center of EMNC technological knowledge generation. The matched group comparisons of external and internal knowledge flows further reveal detailed similarities and differences of competence creation between EMNCs and MMNCs, and among EMNCs.

This study represents one of the first attempts to investigate the post-internationalization technological competence creation of EMNCs by using a novel data source. This study sets the foundation to deepen the understanding of EMNC technological competence creation. The findings suggest interesting propositions and offer important implications for future researches.

The aim of the paper is to identify the determinants of the marketing and managerial knowledge transfer from a foreign subsidiary located in a post-transition country to its headquarters established in a developed country.

The authors combined the critical literature studies and empirical research, where the method of Computer-assisted Telephone Interview (CATI) was applied. The empirical data was gathered from 231 manufacturing foreign subsidiaries established in Poland (as one of the post-transition economy). To test the hypotheses logistic regression was applied.

The knowledge accumulated in the foreign subsidiary, the amount and level of novelty of innovation in the foreign subsidiary and its strategic autonomy is crucial for the occurrence of the reverse knowledge transfer. However, the more powerful the foreign subsidiary is, the less eager it is to transfer marketing and managerial knowledge to the headquarters.

The study is concentrated just on the manufacturing sector in the Polish economy. The results are based on the opinions and perception of managers, but they represent the corporate perspective (not their individual ones).

The study provokes asking the question about the proper level of strategic autonomy of a foreign subsidiary. The implication related to the autonomy is much about the proper strategy for human resources management. The obtained results indicate that the intensity of innovation in a foreign subsidiary “translates” to the outflow of knowledge from a foreign subsidiary to its headquarters. Thus, encourages headquarters to let their subsidiaries innovate still monitoring their power.

FSs are entities more or less embedded in the host markets, thus their strength and sustainable existence is important for their stakeholders, in particular – internal entities such as employees and external entities such as suppliers, and other cooperating organisations and institutions in the host market. The contribution of FSs to the innovation performance and knowledge pool of external partners is determined much by their absorptive capacity. Thus, the results obtained indirectly point to the importance of external agents ability to absorb and exploit the knowledge.

The originality of the paper concerns three issues. Firstly, the previous studies are mainly focused on either developed or emerging markets and as a result, the peculiarity of post-transition economies, like Poland has been neglected. Secondly, the determinants of reverse knowledge transfer are presented from the corporate perspective. Thirdly, authors focus on marketing and management knowledge distributed from a foreign subsidiary to its headquarter.

This study aims to analyze the subsequent investment success of EMNCs after their strategic asset-seeking foreign direct investments (FDIs), while internationalization trajectories of multinational corporations from emerging economies (EMNCs) have been extensively studied, Post-internationalization investment success of EMNCs is defined as extensive technological knowledge access and transfer for knowledge combination. This paper focuses on EMNC explicit knowledge access and transfer.

This study analyzes US patents granted between 2000 and 2014 to leading innovation-oriented EMNCs from China and India as well as to their key competitors from mature industrialized countries (MMNCs). Wilcoxon Rank Sum Test is used to compare the explicit technological knowledge access and transfer patterns of EMNCs and MMNCs. With MMNCs as the benchmark, the comparison allows to imply the patterns and extent of technological knowledge access and transfer of EMNCs.

While subsidiary reverse knowledge transfer is largely missing, EMNCs adopt a parent-centric approach in which the parent directly accesses and transfers explicit knowledge from the external environment of host locations. In doing so, EMNCs at least partially achieve the knowledge access and transfer goals of strategic asset-seeking FDIs.

This study contributes to an in-depth understanding of EMNCs by empirically testing key predictions in extant EMNC literature, namely, the strategic asset-seeking in host locations and the systematic integration of accessed knowledge and resources with home country activities. This study also pioneers the use of the US patent and citation data to empirically study EMNCs.

One of the major conceptual dilemmas of international management has been issue of the liability of foreignness. The multinational enterprise (MNE), as it expands internationally, faces two fundamental problems: does it continue to do abroad what it does well at home, or does it change its approach to adapt to the differing conditions in its new markets? Additionally, the option of changing its approach confronts a major constraint: how to cover the costs of organizational complexity brought on by multinationality. Together, these problems and this constraint imply that multinationals face complexity and strategic-fit costs that quickly overwhelm the gains from economies of scale and scope that are derived from moving abroad into what are, for them, new markets. We know by the fact that multinationals exist and thrive that they are able to overcome these concerns. However, the question of why and how remains something of a mystery, although one we can conceptually work around this with a bit of theoretical and semantic legerdemain.