The determinants of innovation and competitive advantage in fast moving R&D intensive industries
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
Although understanding the determinants of adaptation looks back on a long tradition, it is still in the focus of research. This is particularly so as rapid advancement in technology and highly dynamic environments create the need for faster and flexible action of organizations in order to be successful or simply to survive. Despite the findings of the existing literature, a number of important questions still remain unanswered. Even though human resources have been found to play a key role to enable organizations to reply to environmental opportunities and threats, evidence on how individuals contribute to an organization’s ability to adapt is scarce. The major part of the existing literature analyzes the determinants at the level of the organization. However, a comprehensive understanding of the determinants of adaptation is of particular importance to organizations to enable them to accelerate decision-making processes and to learn how to effectively adapt in technologically dynamic environments. This project builds on the literature on organizational adaptation and knowledge recombination. Since adaptation is investigated in an R&D environment, the study focuses on resource-related determinants of adaptation, i.e. professional experience of key engineers in R&D and industry related experience of the organization. The findings of this study indicate that whereas domain-specific experience at the level of the individual decreases the adaptive ability of an organization, experience from moderately distant technological fields increases it. Experience from more distant fields does not significantly affect the ability of an organization to adapt. Additionally, results provide evidence that organizations can learn how to adapt to an exogenous regulatory change.
