The Mediating Role of Knowledge Acquisition on the Relationship Between External Social Capital and Innovativeness

摘要

In this paper we analyse how external social capital affects innovativeness through knowledge acquisition. Specifically, we test the effect of density, trust and cognitive proximity on the innovativeness of firms and the mediating role of external knowledge acquisition to explain these relationships. We focus our empirical study upon the footwear industry in Spain, using partial least squares to test the proposed hypotheses. The main contribution of this study is to demonstrate how knowledge acquisition leads the firm's external social capital to innovativeness.