Absorptive Capacity

Cohen, W. M., & Levinthal, D. A. (1990). Absorptive Capacity: A New Perspective on Learning and Innovation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 35(1), 128-152.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1990

Volume

35

Issue

1

Pages

128-152

DOI

10.2307/2393553

DOI registrant

JSTOR

Link

https://doi.org/10.2307/2393553

Cited from

organizational_management, synthesized, systems_cybernetics

Cited by

4 citations across 4 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Absorptive Capacity
  • Absorptive Capacity is a system's ability to recognize valuable external knowledge, assimilate it through internal processes and structures, and apply or leverage it to fuel innovation, adaptability, and long-term resilience

    This sourceFoundational paper defining absorptive capacity as the ability to recognize the value of new external information, assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends — a capability largely a function of the firm's level of prior related knowledge and partly a byproduct of its R&D.

• Adaptive Capacity
  • Listed in the references but not attached to a specific claim.
• Arbitrage (Generalized)
  • As Cohen and Levinthal (1990) argue in their "absorptive capacity" framework, a firm's (or researcher's) ability to recognize, assimilate, and apply external knowledge depends on prior related knowledge—so cross-domain arbitrage is not freely available, but accrues to those who have invested in dual fluency.

Domain-specific

• Open Innovation
  • Two conditions constrain the return from openness: absorptive capacity (Cohen and Levinthal's finding that a firm cannot recognize and integrate external knowledge without related internal capability)

Verification

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