Absorptive Capacity and Its Performance Assessment of Non-profit Governmental Organizations - A Case of Taiwanese Pork Industry

摘要

Outside sources of knowledge are critical to a firm's innovation process. Firms can use their absorptive capacity to recognize the value of new external technology, assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends. This paper proposes two types of measures to capture the essential features of absorptive capacity: the cumulative head and amounts invested in acquiring external knowledge to capture the concept of knowledge diversity and the moving average of economic characteristics to capture the notion of preexisting knowledge. Results of regression analyses give support to the two measures in explaining the enhancement of technology performance.