Inter-Organizational Knowledge Transfer Mechanisms in Taiwanese SMEs

This research aims to investigate the issue of how a firm uses different types of mechanism for transferring knowledge with external actors to explore the essential knowledge to develop a new service and further exploit complementary resource for commercialization in the process of innovation. Based on the above research objectives, this research focus on the following main research questions: 1) How do SMEs adopt different types knowledge transfer mechanisms with external actors to contribute to new service development? 2) What factors influence the adoption of knowledge transfer mechanisms in the process of new service development? The present research adopted the concept of information richness, which based on previous studies (e.g. Daft et al., 1987; Sheer and Chen, 2004) to operationalize the capacity of knowledge transfer. These studies argued that different mechanisms can be characterized as high or low degree of information richness. They proposed that the degree of information richness depended on the level of attributes of a mechanism, including its feedback capability, language variety, availability of multiple cues (e.g. voice inflection, words, and graphic symbols) and personal focus (e.g. emotion and feeling). When a mechanism has more of these attributes, it can be identified as higher in information richness and having greater capacity to transfer knowledge.