Search Efforts, Selective Appropriation, and the Usefulness of New Knowledge: Evidence from a Comparison Across U.S. and Non-U.S. Patent Applicants

Prior research calls for more attention to organizational contexts’ moderating effects on a relationship between diversity in antecedent knowledge and resultant new knowledge generation. The authors examined 11,939 firms granted 103,952 U.S. patents between 1975 and 1999, and found a stronger positive association between the diversity and resultant new knowledge’s degree of usefulness under the context more strongly characterized with extensive search efforts (i.e., U.S. applicants). Under the context more strongly characterized with selective appropriation (i.e., non-U.S. applicants), the study found a weaker inverted U-shape association between the diversity and resultant new knowledge’s variability in usefulness. Author’s findings show that it is important needed to properly control for the effect of such organizational contexts for a more conclusive explanation on the role of antecedent knowledge diversity in new knowledge generation.