Incentivizing Innovation: The Role of Knowledge Exchange and Distal Search Behavior

Activity: Talk or presentationScience to science

Description

Prior research has produced conflicting views on whether incentives help or hinder innovation in organizations. In addressing these controversial views, we argue for the importance of focusing on the effects of incentives on the allocation of effort across different behaviors. We highlight distal search and knowledge exchange as two key behaviors within the innovation process and we argue for combining explicit and implicit incentives for fostering them. More specifically, we propose a complementary role of knowledge exchange and distal search behavior in creating innovation performance and we develop hypotheses on how incentives support both of these behaviors to drive innovation performance. We test our hypotheses using survey and patent data from 282 firms in the chemical and pharmaceutical industry and find evidence that is consistent with our predictions.
Period30 May 20181 Jun 2018
Event titleEuropean Accounting Association 41st Annual Congress
Event typeUnknown
Degree of RecognitionInternational

Austrian Classification of Fields of Science and Technology (ÖFOS)

  • 502006 Controlling
  • 502015 Innovation management
  • 502044 Business management
  • 502052 Business administration