ABSTRACT
Many firms in developing and emerging economies have significantly improved their knowledge and innovative capabilities by leveraging the skills of others, including foreign companies. Inter-firm knowledge transfer, leading to external knowledge acquisition from the focal firm’s perspective, has long been viewed as a key prerequisite and sub-process for innovation (Colombi et al., 2011) and a crucial path of late-comer enterprises to catch up (Lu, 2000; Tan, 2006; Guthrie, 2005). Its effectiveness involves such factors as discussed in the literature: characteristics of donor and recipient firms (capabilities and motivation), attributes of the knowledge (tacitness, ambiguity, complexity) and the inter-organizational dynamics (relationship, trust, mechanisms) (Grant, 1996; Easterby-Smith et al., 2008). This literature focuses mainly on the direct forces that determine the flow and easiness of knowledge transfer. However, other factors that represent a broader context of the phenomenon, including state institutional configurations, national culture and socio-economic conditions like social movement and the economic development stage, can fundamentally facilitate or impede the above direct mechanisms through influencing the availability of knowledge sources, the attitudes of the donor and recipients, as well as the process and cost of knowledge transfer.
