Interfirm knowledge transfer: a review of research methodologies

Managers are more and more concerned with the effective management of knowledge generation and its deployment. As a result over the last decade issues concerned with knowledge generation and management has attracted the attention of many researchers. Interfirm knowledge transfer is an important vehicle in knowledge generation and deployment. As far as the authors have been able to ascertain the research methods used in interfirm knowledge transfer studies have not been subjected to a systematic review. In this paper the results of content analysis of research methodologies of 83 empirical studies examining interfirm knowledge transfer published in peer-reviewed journals from 1990 to 2005 are presented. The paper provides a specific description of research methods and analyses employed by prior researchers. It reveals the general patterns of the research methodologies deployed and their limitations. By combining the methodological review with the analysis of main theoretical concepts, the paper offers an explanation for the relationship between the research methodology deployed and the aspect of interfirm knowledge transfer studied. The possible gaps in the current empirical studies of interfirm knowledge transfer from both methodological and theoretical perspectives are identified. A number of possibilities for future studies are proposed. The content analysis is conducted following the classification criteria introduced by Podsakoff and Dalton (1987) with the help of contingency tables and chi-squared tests.