Human capital, organizational learning, network resources and organizational innovativeness

It has been claimed that with product life-cycles shortening and technologies becoming increasingly imitable, organizational knowledge emerges as a major source of competitive advantage. However, as surveyed by KPMG (2003), 80% of the respondents considered knowledge a strategic asset, while 78% believed that they were currently missing out on business opportunities by failing to successfully exploit their available knowledge. To address this issue, this research aims to examine the main questions: how organizational innovativeness can be achieved by knowledge-based resources? What are the underlying mechanisms that transform intangible assets into organizational innovativeness? More specifically, we suggest that organizational innovativeness depends on its human capital, organizational learning and external network resources. Using a two-group comparison method, we surveyed 126 firms in the hardware industry and 43 firms in the software industry in Taiwan. Because these two industries are characterized by different factors, it allows us to compare the specific causal links between the models and draw a broader inference from the results. Partial Least Squares (PLS) was used to test the theoretical model. The findings broadly support the hypotheses and suggest a number of insights about differences between the hardware and software firms.