ABSTRACT
In a number of technologically advanced industries, a new logic of organizing is developing. Rather than viewing firms as vehicles for processing information, making decisions, and solving problems, the core capabilities of organizations are based increasingly on knowledge-seeking and knowledge-creation. In technologically intensive fields, where there are large gains from innovation and steep losses from obsolescence, competition is best regarded as a learning race. The ability to learn about new opportunities requires participation in them, thus a wide range of interorganizational linkages is critical to knowledge diffusion, learning, and technology development. These connections may be formal contractual relationships, as in a research and development partnerships or a joint venture, or informal, involving participation in technical communities. Both mechanisms are highly salient for the transfer of knowledge and are reinforcing. Yet even though the awareness of the importance of both external sources of knowledge and external participation has grown, we know much less about how knowledge is generated, transferred, and acted upon in these new contexts.
