Knowledge Complementarity and Boundary Spanning for Continuous Innovation

With the increase of customer demands and rapid development of information and communication technologies, enterprises are facing strenuous competition. Global enterprises are currently engaged in continuous innovation to compete and sustain themselves in the dynamic changing market. Both technological and customer knowledge have been identified as crucial for building knowledge complementarity for delivery of innovation. Most studies in the literature focus on testing for the existence of complementarity between inputs and the effect on output, this study focus on explaining how technological knowledge complements customer knowledge span boundaries to achieve innovation. Based on the concept of boundary spanning, this study is to design a useful instrument to measure knowledge complementarity for continuous innovation. The result is to provide the operationalizable indexes of the scope and depth of knowledge interaction for knowledge complementarity. Finally, different levels of scope and depth of knowledge interaction for knowledge complementarity will affect innovation.