Authors: Desireé Blankenburg Holm; Martin Johanson; Ulf Andersson
Network structures and relational characteristics have become increasingly prevalent in the study ofhow firms find and exploit market and technological opportunities. Some scholars claim that a largenumber of relationships with a low degree of relational embeddedness facilitate a firm’s possibilities togather new knowledge others stress a high degree of embeddedness between the firm and itscounterparts in order to absorb the new knowledge. The same bi-polarity can be seen when networkstructures are considered certain scholars favor open structures while others favor closed networkstructures. The fact that each firm has restrictions in terms of resources highlights the question of howconfigurations of networks and relationships influence firms’ possibilities to find and exploitopportunities. In this paper, we utilize different strands of theories about network structure andrelationship characteristics to develop an understanding of how they should be configured in order tofacilitate a firm’s search for opportunities.Keywords: Opportunities, Relational Embeddedness, Network Structure
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Publish Year: 2005
Conference: Rotterdam, Netherlands (2005)