How corporate entrepreneurs use interfirm collaboration in the search for emerging knowledge in biotech innovation

This chapter focuses on the idea of collaborative entrepreneurship, that is, the creation of value based on new, cooperatively generated ideas resulting from sharing information and knowledge between firms. More specifically, we investigate how firms access and search for emerging knowledge, which is especially crucial for firms in high-technology industries. This chapter investigates this issue drawing on a sample of American biotechnology firms. It shows that exploration is negatively related to the search for emerging knowledge, and that collaboration attenuates the negative relationship between exploration and emerging knowledge. In this way, this research provides a more fine-grained understanding of knowledge search and the relationship between exploration and emerging knowledge. It also illustrates the important but complex role that collaborations play in this process. Collaborations are found to have only a weak direct effect on the use of emerging knowledge, but provide firms with an organizational mechanism with which to conduct exploration and simultaneously remain close to the frontier of emerging knowledge.