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Markus Grillitsch

Senior Lecturer

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Bridging the gap : citizenship diversity and global innovation networks in small and medium size companies

Author

  • Markus Grillitsch
  • Cristina Chaminade

Summary, in English

Recent literature stresses the increasing importance of global innovation networks (GINs) as a mechanism to organize innovation across geographical space. This paper investigates why and to what extent citizenship diversity of the firm's employees relates to the engagement of small and medium size companies in GINs. Citizenship diversity provides knowledge about the institutional context of other countries, increased capabilities to deal with institutional differences, larger social networks to build GINs and a broader search space. Further, the paper examines how the absorptive capacity of firms mediates the relationship between citizenship diversity and GINs. The empirical study is based on a linked employee-employer dataset with 6,771 observations of innovative small and medium size firms in Sweden. It provides strong evidence that the engagement in GINs is positively related to citizenship diversity, depending, however, on the absorptive capacity of firms.

Department/s

  • Department of Human Geography
  • Department of Economic History

Publishing year

2018-12-02

Language

English

Pages

2279-2303

Publication/Series

European Planning Studies

Volume

26

Issue

12

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Topic

  • Human Geography

Keywords

  • absorptive capacity
  • citizenship diversity
  • Global innovation networks
  • institutions
  • open innovation

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 0965-4313