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Partners’ partners matter: the effect of partners’ centrality diversity on the focal organization’s innovation outputs

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Abstract

Despite the importance of partner diversity in managing the innovation process, prior studies mainly focus on characteristics within an organization. Our understanding of how diversity among partners’ network structures can affect the focal organization’s innovation outputs is still limited. This study addresses the above research gap by developing a model that explains how partners’ centrality diversity affects the focal organization’s innovation outputs and investigates the influencing mechanisms in depth by introducing knowledge diversity as a mediator and knowledge distance as a moderator. We select data of the smartphone collaboration network from 2004 to 2017. The regression results suggest that partners’ centrality diversity has an inverted U-shaped relationship with exploratory innovation and positively affects exploitative innovation. Additionally, knowledge diversity mediates the effect of the partners’ centrality diversity on exploratory innovation. The findings also indicate that knowledge distance weakens the effect of the partners’ centrality diversity on knowledge diversity.

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Funding

Funding was provide by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Numbers 71871182, 72101274, 72271143), General Program of Humanities and Social Sciences Research of Ministry of Education of China (Grant Number 22YJC630134), Natural Science Foundation of Shannxi Province (Grant Number 2023-JC-QN-0787), Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province (Grant Number 2022JJ40646), and Social Science Foundation of Hunan Province (Grant Number 20YBQ104).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management, Shandong University, Jinan, People’s Republic of China

    Jingbei Wang

  2. College of Economic & Management, Xi’an University of Posts & Telecommunications, Xi’an, People’s Republic of China

    Min Guo

  3. School of Business, Central South University, Changsha, People’s Republic of China

    Hui Liu

  4. School of Management, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, People’s Republic of China

    Yafei Nie

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  1. Jingbei Wang
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Correspondence to Min Guo.

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Wang, J., Guo, M., Liu, H. et al. Partners’ partners matter: the effect of partners’ centrality diversity on the focal organization’s innovation outputs. Scientometrics 128, 1547–1565 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04637-1

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