Distal and proximal cues: role of firm units and inventors in organizational knowledge development

Knowledge development within a firm proceeds by relying on cues of knowledge richness. Much of the emphasis has been on proximal cues of knowledge, provided by the inventor’s position in the network, that predict the use of inventor’s knowledge within the firm. In this paper, we theorize about overlooked cues of knowledge, provided by the inventor’s unit, and explore their effects on the utilization of inventor’s knowledge by the firm. We consider intra-unit knowledge heterogeneity and the unit’s dissimilarity with the firm as distal cues of the inventor’s knowledge. These distal cues are expected to have an inverted-U effect on the extent of inventor’s knowledge used within the firm. In addition, we propose that the inventor’s proximal cue from structural hole spanning in the internal collaboration network moderates the relationships between distal cues and organizational development of inventor knowledge.