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This study aims to develop a model of learning-by-hiring in which knowledge gains may occur at the time of recruitment but also after recruitment when other incumbent organizational members assimilate a recruit’s knowledge. The author’s model predicts that experienced recruits are more likely to catalyze change to their organization’s core technological capabilities.

The continuous-time parametric hazard rate regressions predict core technological change in a long panel (1970–2017) of US biotechnology industry patent data. The author uses over 140,000 patents to model the evolution of knowledge of over 52,000 scientists and over 4,450 firms. To address endogeneity concerns, the author uses the Heckman selection method and does robustness tests using a difference-in-difference analysis.

The author finds that a hire’s prior research and development (R&D) experience helps overcome inertia arising from her or his new-to-an-organization “distant” knowledge to increase the likelihood of core technological change. In addition, while the author finds that incumbent organizational members resist technological change, experienced hires may effectively induce them to adopt new ways of doing things. This is particularly the case when hires collaborate with incumbents in R&D projects. Understanding the effects of hiring on core technological change, therefore, benefits from an assessment of hire R&D experience and its effects on incumbent inertia in an organization.

First, the author does not recommend managers to hire scientists with considerable distant knowledge only as this may be detrimental to core technological change. Second, the author recommends organizations striving to effectuate technological change to hire people with considerable prior R&D experience as this confers them with the ability to influence other members and socialize incumbent members. Third, the author recommends that managers hire people with both significant levels of prior experience and distant knowledge as they are complements. Finally, the author recommends managers to encourage collaboration between highly experienced hired scientists and long-tenured incumbent organizational members to facilitate incumbent learning, socialization and adoption of new ways of doing things.

This study develops a model of learning-by-hiring, which, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, is the first to propose, test and advance KM literature by showing the effectiveness of experienced hires to stimulate knowledge diffusion and core technological change over time after being hired. This study contributes to innovation, organizational learning and strategy literatures.

This study aims to answer the question of how incumbent firms cultivate dynamic capabilities through knowledge management so that they can efficiently adapt to the changing external environment.

This study adopts a case study approach and collects data through interviews and secondary public information on the lighting industry and two lighting firms in Lin'an, China. It qualitatively examines the challenges and strategic recommendations for incumbent firms in the context of discontinuous technological change from a knowledge management perspective.

Incumbent firms often face a variety of challenges when responding to discontinuous technological change. These challenges include identifying opportunities, overcoming path dependence and dealing with employee resistance to change. To overcome these difficulties, three strategies have been proposed to enhance the dynamic capabilities of incumbent firms through knowledge management: cross-border search helps firms improve their knowledge acquisition capabilities and better understand their environment to identify opportunities; building strategic leadership overcomes path dependence and improves knowledge integration capabilities; organizational learning deepens employees’ understanding of change and enhances organizational knowledge application capabilities.

Previous research attributes a firm's ability to cope with discontinuous technological change solely to its general resources, which weakens the importance of knowledge management in this context. This study emphasizes the importance of knowledge as a crucial strategic resource in developing the essential dynamic capabilities for incumbent firms to cope with discontinuous technological change.

This study provides an in-depth analysis of incumbent firms' coping strategies in the new context of discontinuous technological change and further promotes cross-disciplinary research.

This study provides an in-depth analysis of coping strategies in the new context of discontinuous technological change, furthermore theoretically advancing the interdisciplinary research of firm transformation and knowledge management. Meanwhile, it is crucial to identify the preconditions for cultivating dynamic capabilities, especially from a knowledge-based view, which enhances the depth of knowledge management research.

The current paper's goal is to examine the productivity of the closed banking sector evidenced from Ethiopia. In addition, the inclusion of intangibles on productivity was examined in the current paper.

First, the standard Malmquist Productivity Index (MPI) was employed for 13 commercial banks for both stages. Second, by excluding the state-owned commercial bank, the analysis employed a bootstrapped MPI for the robust and comprehensive conclusion. Furthermore, from 2010 to 2019, the fixed effect Ordinary Least Square (OLS) regression with balanced panel data was used.

The standard MPI in both stages shows that the productivity of Ethiopian commercial banks is declining. The technological shock was the main reason for the loss. The catch-up in both stages scored above unity, mainly due to the pure efficiency change. Besides, when combined with tangible resources, the inclusion of resource-based view (RBV) proxy variables reduces technological shock regress and ultimately improves productivity change. The bootstrapped MPI also reveals that technological shock is the primary source of the productivity decline. However, efficiency change also contributes to the productivity decline based on this estimation.

Future research could examine the more extensive productivity analysis by considering the primary sources of data collections for resource-based variables.

According to the study's results, banking regulatory authorities and bank management, including the shareholders, should continue to invest in cutting-edge technology to improve the productivity of the banking sector.

This is the first comprehensive study of productivity for Ethiopian commercial banks based on the standard MPI, bootstrapped MPI, and OLS by incorporating all resources into the analysis.

Knowledge search is considered a broad concept and semi-intentional behavior. The path and boundary conditions through which search strategies affect intra-organizational knowledge creation remain elusive. Drawing on recombinant search theory and knowledge-based view, the authors seek to identify knowledge complexity as an important intermediate variable between knowledge search and innovation performance, such as research and development (R&D) output and R&D output quality. A second goal of this study is to examine the moderating roles of government support and technological turbulence.

The authors employed a longitudinal panel of 609 global pharmaceutical firms and obtained the firms' patent records from 1980 to 2015 for the analysis. The authors used generalized estimating equations (GEE) to evaluate the models and tested the consistency via panel fixed-effects estimations.

The authors' findings show that organizational routine-guided search has a negative effect on knowledge complexity, while routine-changing search exerts a positive impact on knowledge complexity. Governmental support and technological turbulence moderate these relationships. Notably, knowledge complexity has an inverted U-shaped relationship with innovation performance.

The authors' research context, the pharmaceutical industry, may constrain the generalizability of our findings. In addition, potential types of routine-guided and routine-changing search behaviors were not considered.

Despite these limitations, this study offers important implications. First, knowledge complexity transmits the effects of knowledge search on innovation performance. Practitioners should balance routine-guided and routine-changing search processes to build and manage complex knowledge. Second, a moderate level of knowledge complexity is the key to good R&D output and R&D output quality.

The study identifies knowledge complexity as one important intermediate variable between knowledge search behaviors and intra-organizational knowledge creation.

This study aims to build a theoretical model including intermediate-level outside-in marketing capabilities (ILOIMC), radical and incremental technological innovations and management innovation.

This research used 272 pairs of survey questionnaires from Chinese firms’ managers to examine the hypotheses.

The results indicate that ILOIMC enhance management innovation by stimulating radical technological innovation. Furthermore, the mediating effect of incremental technological innovation depends on technological turbulence.

This study may have several limitations which future research could try to overcome: cross-sectional data, Chinese samples, exclusive focus on ILOIMC, sociotechnical approach to innovation typology and measuring ILOIMC as a first-order variable.

ILOIMC can significantly improve innovations in technology and management systems by using customer value and market information.

This study proposes a new taxonomy to classify marketing capabilities into lower-level inside-out marketing capabilities, ILOIMC and higher-level outside-in marketing capabilities. It also provides an explicit discussion and examination of the influence of ILOIMC on technological and management innovations and the contingency effect of technological turbulence. Thus, it responds to Musarra and Morgan’s (2020) call for more research into the mechanism that explains when (the conditions under which) and how (the process by which) outside-in marketing capabilities could contribute to firm innovation.

The purpose of this study is to determine the influence of project critical success factors (CSFs) on change management in the context of business process management (BPM). Despite widespread interest in BPM, the existing literature is insufficient in addressing the antecedents that contribute to change management in business process projects.

Key factors of change management success in BPM projects were initially identified in a systematic literature review (SLR) and were used as antecedents of change management through a structural equation modeling (SEM) with 464 business project stakeholders. Next, a neural network analysis allowed the key factors to be ranked non-linearly. Finally, a latent class analysis (LCA) was performed to determine the sample's heterogeneous groups based on their project management characteristics.

Project management, top management support and technological competencies were the main CSFs identified as having positive effects on change management. The most important factor is project management, followed by top management support, which plays a crucial mediating role in enabling change management. Although relevant, technological competencies were secondary in the study. Regarding project management CSF, four heterogeneous classes of individuals were determined.

Although this study provides an opportunity to observe CSFs, it does not address the need to analyze the phenomenon in different classifications of projects, regarding maturity, complexity, project management approach and other aspects that differentiate projects in a meaningful way.

The study allows practitioners to understand the critical factors underlying change management and take necessary actions to manage it, recognizing that individuals have heterogeneous profiles regarding project management.

This study pioneeringly discusses the CSFs of change management BPM projects to enable successful change management, ranking the main factors and mapping heterogeneous profiles.

This paper examines to what extent formal training targeted to workers aged 45 and over could enhance their knowledge transmission activities specifically in changing work environments. This is a key issue for human resources practitioners. Allowing older workers to keep on interacting with their colleagues and transmitting their knowledge acquired through experience reduces the risk for firms of losing critical knowledge assets.

The authors use French-matched employer–employee data to estimate the effect of participation in training sessions intended to support change on the probability for workers aged 45–59 of frequently showing work practices to their co-workers. To account for selection bias in training, the authors reduce the group of untrained workers to those who wanted to attend a training session but had to cancel their participation for exogenous reasons. Leuven and Oosterbeek (2008) show that this is a valid approximation of a random assignment to training.

Training with the intention to support change for workers aged 45 and more significantly increases knowledge transmission for training participants. This effect is not strictly related to a supervising role as it is significant for workers without subordinates; it holds when the authors address the selection bias in training by narrowing down the comparison group. When training comes as a response to mitigate the potential negative effects of technological or organizational changes in the work environment, it helps workers aged 45–59 maintain their contribution to the knowledge base of the production.

Our findings suggest that two main aspects have to be borne in mind when assessing the effectiveness of training for older workers. First, the reasons for training must be carefully considered, especially if it occurs in response to technological or organizational change in the workplace. Second, the continuation of interactions between older workers and their co-workers must be factored. If the public debate acknowledges that employee learning and development is critical in times of structural change and crisis, the outcomes of knowledge transmission within workplaces in terms of job satisfaction, turnover intentions, productivity or innovation, which the authors do not cover in this paper, deserve further investigations. In particular, the authors believe that studying how the training that supports technological and organizational change influences the relationship between age diversity and firm productivity is a promising avenue for future research.

The implication of this article for human resource managers is that there may be a substantial cost to not updating the skills of older workers after technological or organizational change. Indeed, it is likely that a large proportion of jobs will only be partially automated, which implies that while some tasks will disappear, rendering the corresponding skills obsolete, others will persist and the skills associated with them will remain useful to organizations. If older workers are excluded from their work collectives after these changes, because their skills have not been updated through training, the knowledge from their accumulated experience that remains valuable will be irrevocably lost when they retire.

This study sheds a new light on the effectiveness of older workers’ training. Some contributions argue that training for older workers is not very effective because it has no significant effect on employment duration, earnings or relative productivity. The authors show that specific types of training to update skills after a technological or organizational change allow older workers to keep interacting with their co-workers and pass on their knowledge gained through experience, thereby reducing the risk for firms of losing critical knowledge assets.

To investigate the relationship between technological diversification and firm performance as a function of varying levels of technological coupling and internal technological change.

A longitudinal study of US-based bio-pharmaceutical companies.

Technological diversification improves invention performance. However, high levels of technological coupling reduce this effect.

Firms with highly diversified technological portfolios should strive to keep their technologies at low levels of technological coupling.

This is the first study to show that technological coupling reduces the positive effect of technological diversification on firms' invention performance.

This paper aims to explore how customer involvement unfolds in the development of a smart product. Smart product development poses new challenges to firms. In particular, the buyers’ and users’ involvement has shown novel dynamics in smart product development. These peculiarities are linked with the specific characteristics of the digital technology embedded into the smart products. This study’s rationale is to analyse the frictions arising from potential divergent objectives between the focal firm and its customers when digital technologies are embedded in traditional products.

This study adopted an explorative and qualitative approach to investigate new emerging dynamics of customer involvement during technological development. A coffee machine producer is selected as a case study to uncover new insights and a novel perspective on the phenomenon of customer involvement in smart product development. Data analysis followed an abductive approach that allowed to identify the dimensions of friction emerging during the technological development process.

The case study analysis depicts that smart product development presents novel customer involvement dynamics. In particular, this study abductively identifies dimensions of friction emerging between the focal firm and buyers/users. Friction arises in the technological interface between the actors involved. These dimensions of friction address the complexities of developing technology in terms of smart products with customer involvement. This study suggests that embedding of technology into an existing product might change how customers are involved.

Even though customer involvement in product innovation has been extensively studied in management literature, this paper focused on a new type of innovation, smart products. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no previous studies have yet empirically explored customers’ involvement while embedding digital technologies into existing products to create smart products. In particular, this study sheds light on the dimensions of friction emerging between the focal firm and the actors of the business network. This study unfolds novel contributions to the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing literature on technological development.

This study aims to examine how the knowledge breadth and depth of a patent affect its likelihood of being pledged. It also seeks to explore whether these relationships change diversely in different technological environments.

A complementary log-log model with random effects was conducted to test the hypotheses using a unique data set consisting of 348,927 invention patents granted by the China National Intellectual Property Administration from 1985 to 2015 belonging to 74,996 firms.

The findings reveal that both knowledge breadth and depth of a patent positively affect its likelihood of being pledged. Furthermore, the knowledge breadth and depth entail different degrees of superiority in different technological environments.

This study focuses on the effect of an individual patent’s knowledge base on its likelihood of being selected as collateral. It does not consider the influence of the overall knowledge characteristics of the selected patent portfolio.

Managers need to pay attention to patents’ knowledge characteristics and the changes in technological environments to select the most suitable patents as collateral and thus improve the success rate of pledge financing.

This study explores the impact of multidimensional characteristics of knowledge base on patent pledge financing within a systematic theoretical framework and incorporates technological environments into this framework.