Knowledge Creation and Social Networks in Corporate Entrepreneurship: The Renewal of Organizational Capability

TLDR

Entrepreneurial ideas evolve through subjectivist, empiricist, and pragmatic criteria, while actor centrality, structural equivalence, and bridging ties enable individuals to acquire new information and influence within organizations. The study extends theory by integrating knowledge dynamics and social structure to explain how organizations overcome inertia in capability development. An integrative model is proposed that links these assertions to describe the process by which organizations surmount inertia in developing capabilities. The model shows how individual knowledge enters and becomes shared within organizational processes, and it yields propositions for future empirical research and practical implications.

Abstract

This paper extends current theory by analyzing the knowledge dynamics and social structure of the internal selection-retention environment. On the knowledge side, our view is that entrepreneurial ideas are subjected progressively to subjectivist, empiricist, and pragmatic criteria in the process of knowledge creation. This argument helps to explain how individual knowledge enters an organizational process and how individual knowledge becomes shared within the group. For social structures, we argue that actor centrality, structural equivalence, and bridging relationships account for an individual's ability to acquire novel information and to achieve a position of influence. Combining these assertions, the paper offers an integrative model that explains how organizations overcome inertia in the capability development process. A series of propositions are deduced as a basis for conducting future empirical research, and the paper closes with a discussion of the model's implications for theory and practice.