Direct and Interactive Effects of Brokerage Roles on Innovation in Clustered Firms

Abstract

Social network analysis has generated a great number of research findings in the organizational and management literature, in which the so-called territorial clusters have often been represented through the network metaphor. However, while scholars primarily examine the network structure and the internal heterogeneity, we have specifically analyzed the diverse types or roles of informational brokers which firms can perform. We also posit that innovation generated by these firms is moderated by their own capabilities and, more particularly, we analyze how innovation is affected by brokerage roles and the moderating effect of R&D in the Spanish ceramic tile cluster. Our results show that different brokerage roles played by clustered firms have different implications in terms of innovation. Another relevant and related result refers to the interactive effect of brokerage roles and absorptive capacity, which becomes more or less significant depending on the role being played in each case.