吸收能力的理论演化与研究述评

The Theoretical Evolution and the Research Prospect of Absorptive Capacity

在开放式创新背景下,企业有效地识别、获取外部有潜在利用价值的知识并进行商业化利用可以有效地提高企业竞争优势。吸收能力的概念自1989年被Cohen&Levinthal提出以来,迅速成为创新理论、组织与战略管理理论的研究热点,但至今仍存在吸收能力概念与维度划分模糊不清、研究层面单一、只注重前因后果分析等问题。文章从吸收能力的思想渊源入手、对其理论基础进行归纳与梳理,并对其现有研究进行述评。同时,文章还指出研究的不足和局限性并给出政策建议。

With the background of open innovation, enterprises should identify and acquire the potentially valuable knowledge from external, and make use of it to commercialize so as to effectively improve their competitive advantages. Since 1989, Cohen and Levinthal proposed the concept of ‘absorptive capacity＇, it quickly became the research hotspot within innovation theory, organization and strategic management theory. Nevertheless, there still exist some problems, i.e., the concept of absorptive capacity is indistinct,the research level is mono, and a lot of works only paid attention to the Causality Analysis. In this paper, the origin of absorptive capacity is first introduced, and its theoretical basis are summarized, then the current status of the research are reviewed, finally,some suggestions and the worthwhile research directions are put forward based on the analysis of insufficiencies of current research.