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Knowledge Brokering And Organizational Innovation: Founder Imprinting Effects, David Hsu, Kwanghui Lim

Kwanghui Lim

We empirically examine the innovation consequences of organizational knowledge brokering, the ability to effectively apply knowledge from one technical domain to innovate in another. We investigate how organizational innovation outcomes vary by founders’ initial mode of venture ideation. We then compare how firms started with knowledge brokering-based ideation differ in their methods of sustaining ongoing knowledge brokering capacity as compared to firms not started in such a manner. We do so by tracking all the start-up biotechnology firms founded to commercialize the then-emergent recombinant DNA technology (the sample of initial knowledge brokers) together with a contemporaneously founded sample of biotechnology …