Towards a deeper understanding of the emergence of process innovations: Which role do inter-organisational learning and internal knowledge exploitation play?

We demonstrate that suppliers as external partners act as promising information sources for incremental process innovations, while internal knowledge is more likely to provoke radical process innovations. However, this relation changes if suppliers are come from a distant geographic or a distance industry sector. Our paper contributes to the ongoing discussion surrounding operation innovations by highlighting that the distance between the industry sector of supplier and manufacturer accounts for the degree to which manufacturers are able to benefit from external information. Our findings add to an improved understanding of how internal knowledge stocks can be effectively combined with external knowledge.