Empirical Research on the Impacts of Geographic Boundary-spanning Search on Innovation Performance

Boundary-spanning search has been argued to be important for the success of innovation. There are various kinds of dimensions about organizational search activities. Past studies on boundary-spanning search have focused mainly on technological dimension. We characterize the boundary-spanning search on geographic dimension. We propose a conceptual model and 6 hypotheses. Data from 156 firms were collected to test above hypotheses. The results show that both local search and nonlocal search have positive effect on incremental innovation. What's more, local search is more positive than nonlocal search on incremental innovation. Meanwhile, both local search and nonlocal search have positive effect on breakthrough innovation. However, it is not supported by data that nonlocal is more positive than local search on breakthrough innovation.