Organizational determinants and idiosyncrasies of firms' absorptive capacity in a developing country

摘要

This article analyses the idiosyncrasies and organizational determinants of the absorptive capacity (AC) of firms located in a developing country. Theoretically, this article characterizes a 'vicious circle of limited AC in Latin American firms. Empirically, the Brazilian Innovation Survey (2011 and 2014) is employed to analyze the role of organizational innovation and different innovative efforts to build two types of AC: (1) academic AC (to absorb knowledge from universities or research institutes); (2) market AC (to absorb knowledge from suppliers, clients, or competitors). The main results indicate that firms develop both types of AC through training and acquisition of external Research and Development (R&D), instead of expenditure on internal R&D; academic AC is also built by external relationships and the firms' researchers' skills, while market AC is primarily affected by better internal knowledge diffusion. These results qualify the generic argument of limited AC for firms in a Latin American context.