Organizational knowledge networks and local search: The role of intra-organizational inventor networks

While firms tend to build on their own knowledge, we distinguish between depth and breadth of local search to investigate the drivers of these behaviors. Given that inventors in a firm carry out the knowledge creation activities, we strive to identify inventors responsible for these behaviors by employing the notion of an intra-firm inventor network. A longitudinal examination of 14,575 inventors from four large semiconductor firms using patent data supports our hypotheses that the reach of inventors in the intra-firm network and their span of structural holes have independent and interactive effects on these two types of local search behaviors. These findings have implications for research on exploitation and exploration, organizational knowledge, knowledge networks, and micro-foundations.