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The purpose of this guest editorial is to highlight the importance of knowledge management and organizational learning in firm innovation, offering an integrative framework to understand this complex business phenomenon.

Based on the literature review, the guest editorial shows a general review on “A Knowledge‐Based View of Firm Innovation” articulating and integrating a total number of ten theoretical and empirical contributions about this topic.

Theoretical and empirical works are organized in three main topics. The first one refers to the importance of external knowledge, networking, and relationships as key drivers of firm technological innovation, offering an “open or relational innovation framework”. The second one shows several papers on the growing importance of KIBS (Knowledge‐Intensive Business Services) in a Knowledge Economy and Society. Finally, this general review integrates papers about organizational context, and its role on knowledge management and firm innovation.

The paper and special issue tries to offer some new relevant advances for the academic community in the growing body of knowledge management and firm innovation. Nevertheless, due to its special issue nature, the theoretical and empirical advances showed on it represent only a partial view of a “Knowledge‐Based View of Firm Innovation”.

Managers need to understand the precise nature and sources (internals and externals) of firm innovation. In this vein, this journal number shows empirical research developed in different countries and industries illustrating some interesting insights about this complex business phenomenon.

This general review shows new lines of theoretical and empirical research regarding knowledge management, organizational learning, and firm innovation in a useful integrative framework: “A Knowledge‐Based View of Firm Innovation”

The aim of the paper is to identify the different directions of external knowledge search and to investigate their individual effect on performance at the firm level.

The empirical study is based on survey data gathered from two distinct informants of 248 large- and medium-sized high-tech manufacturing Spanish firms. In dealing with concerns on simultaneity and reverse causality, perceived time-lags among dependent and independent variables were introduced. Quantitative methods based on questionnaire answers were used.

Findings reveal six distinct external search patterns and indicate that, while market sources such as customers and competitors are positively associated with performance, knowledge acquired from general information sources, other firms beyond the core business and patents and databases have no significant effect. Moreover, knowledge obtained from science and technology organizations and from suppliers displays an inversed U-shaped effect on firm performance.

Conclusions can only be generalized to high-tech manufacturing firms from developed countries and, although well-established methodological procedures were followed, the nature of the study remains cross-sectional. Yet, an important implication emerges from this work: more openness to external knowledge is not always better. It is necessary to carefully evaluate the potential gains and pains of each type of partner and source.

This research provides guidance to managers about how to shape their companies’ inter-organizational networks, i.e. the specific external agents on which they should focus, as well as the efforts they should devote to each of these key partners.

By considering distinct directions of external knowledge search instead of a single dimension, the paper contributes to shed some more light to the mixed results reported by the scarce empirical studies that have investigated the effect of openness towards external knowledge on performance at the firm level.

The elements that constitute the organizational capital or capital of the firm, namely its culture, structure, organizational learning, can be a source of competitive advantage. This paper is an attempt to assess organizational capital from the resource‐based view.

From an extensive literature review, an assessment framework for intellectual capital is developed.

By means of this framework organizational capital can be depicted as a set of: valuable assets; difficult to imitate; to replace; to transfer; with a prolonged life expectancy; and with a feasible rent appropriation.

Building of such an evaluation framework allows further research about other components of the intellectual capital of the firm, bridging the literatures focused on the resource‐based view and on intangible assets or intellectual capital.

In the present business landscape, relations between firms are one of the most valuable assets. This work points out the main agents to which firms are related, and which build up their relational capital. This proposal highlights the gathering of agents in different levels; one of them constituted by the relations with customers, suppliers, partners, and investors; and the second one related to the relations with state or public sector entities, regulatory institutions, and with the community, as part of a wider or more general environment. Once presented, relational capital, the strategic relevance of corporate reputation is discussed, with a trigger and moderator role for all the previously mentioned relations.

The purpose of this paper is to try to assess the applicability of the SECI model (Nonaka and Takeuchi) to the processes of external knowledge acquisition for firms located on knowledge‐intensive clusters. The paper's intended contribution lies in improving our understanding about the different mechanisms that organizations can use to learn from this kind of environment.

The paper uses survey data obtained from a sample of knowledge‐intensive firms from Boston's Route 128, with custom tailored measurement scales. It applies a quantitative method based on questionnaire answers.

Findings show that external knowledge acquisition takes place through three different processes that raise important differences and similarities with the SECI model.

Conclusions can only be generalized to firms located in knowledge‐intensive clusters. Nevertheless, some implications for management practice can be derived. Tacit knowledge from the environment requires different mechanisms in order to be successfully incorporated into the organization, whereas explicit knowledge acquisition can be managed more smoothly. Managers should pay special attention when designing channels for acquiring external tacit knowledge.

The SECI model reveals itself to be a powerful guide for starting research about external knowledge acquisition. Nevertheless, context specific variables can show industry or country preferred ways for learning in practice, so highly focused empirical research may be required to disentangle the peculiarities of tacit knowledge.

In the field of external knowledge acquisition by organizations, empirical works about testing widely spread theoretical models are very scarce. This paper takes the theoretical processes of the SECI model and extends them for external knowledge acquisition.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the effects of knowledge spillovers on innovation and collaboration among firms located in science and technology parks (STPs). To do so, whether knowledge spillovers imply a greater degree of innovation in its various forms – product, process, organisational and commercial – and greater inter‐organisational collaboration on research and development (R&D) is analysed. Explicitly, this article examines these effects by identifying and distinguishing between firms located on and off STPs.

This paper adopts a quantitative approach. After reviewing the literature, the study tests the hypotheses empirically using a sample of 784 firms, and performing several logistic binomial regressions to analyse the impact of each type of knowledge spillover on each type of innovation and on the likelihood of firms establishing inter‐organisational collaborative R&D agreements.

The results show that knowledge spillovers have a positive impact on firm propensity to innovate and on the probability of firms engaging in inter‐organisational R&D collaboration. Furthermore, firm location within an STP is found to influence the intensity of the effect of spillovers on innovation and on R&D cooperation. Thus, the magnitude of the effects of spillovers differs according to the type of the spillover.

Given the special features of spillovers and the scarce evidence available analysing the relationship between spillovers, innovation and cooperation and the location on STPs, this work contributes significant empirical evidence to the existing literature.

The literature shows several intellectual capital models. Nevertheless, there is little empirical evidence about the building blocks that form intellectual capital in practice. The purpose of this paper is to test the widespread categorization of human capital, structural capital, and relational capital with a survey applied to high‐technology firms from Spain.

Factor analysis was conducted with a sample of 49 firms (larger than 50 employees).

The results indeed demonstrate the existence of three main components of intellectual capital that, in general, fit the dominant structure proposed by other authors.

Before moving into an internationally accepted system for classification and measurement of intellectual capital, future research should seek a geographical and industrial agreement about the main components of this construct. In that direction, our empirical evidence provides only the experience of Spanish high‐tech firms; this experience could be different in other countries or industries.

In this paper, managers interested in the field can find a useful guidance for structuring an intellectual capital balance sheet, taking the three proposed components as main dimensions, and the items of the survey as a measurement tool for analyzing the intellectual strengths and weaknesses of their firms.

Academics can also benefit from this research, taking it as a basis for replication studies about intellectual capital in other countries and/or industries. This article presents one of the first empirical tests of the theoretically accepted components of intellectual capital.

This paper aims to find and rank the barriers of the four knowledge management (KM) processes including generation, storage, distribution and application in the gas and petroleum sector.

Reviewing the literature of KM and organizational learning, this paper extracted all of the barriers which impede KM processes. Then it designed a questionnaire for validating, ranking and categorizing barriers. Totally, 190 completed questionnaires were gathered from 26 gas and petroleum companies in Iran. Some statistical tests such as T, Friedman, Kruskal–Wallis and Mann–Whitney were used for analyzing data.

Findings reviewed the current literature of KM barriers, validated and ranked the barriers of knowledge generation, storage, distribution and application separately. The importance of knowledge generation and knowledge application barriers were significantly different between gas and petroleum companies. Hence they were disjointedly ranked for gas and petroleum. Finally, KM barriers were ranked according to their contribution to KM processes and the average mean of their importance in KM processes.

From the practical point of view, this paper suggests managers of gas and petroleum companies to emphasize solving high-priority barriers according to the KM process which they are focused on. Furthermore, the study provides a checklist that can be used as an assessment tool for evaluating KM processes considering barriers.

This paper finds the importance of each barrier for each of the four KM processes and ranks the “critical barriers” according to their contribution to four KM processes in the gas and petroleum sector.

Previous literature notes that more remains to be understood about the relationship between organizational knowledge and innovation. In this article the author seeks to argue that innovation depends on efficient knowledge integration, while the latter depends on factors internal and external to product development teams.

This paper proposes a conceptual framework that takes into account firm‐internal knowledge integration of human and technological assets. In particular, the author analyzes and discusses knowledge integration mechanisms which a firm strategically deploys in the innovation process.

Knowledge‐relatedness, the extent to which product development teams are specialized in related scientific or technological fields, is proposed as an important moderator for the relationship between operating routines and innovative performance. If many product development teams perform well, innovative firm performance will increase.

The author notes the need for empirical inquiry which can build on the theoretical model. Other possible moderators, such as the physical proximity of knowledge‐related product development teams and the frequency of knowledge‐related personnel transfer from one product development team to another, would be interesting avenues for further research.

Specifying operating routines with respect to integrating functional and technological knowledge can result in innovative firm performance.

The article adds to the knowledge‐based view of the firm while analyzing how a firm can make use of its heterogeneous knowledge for innovation. The author shows how knowledge‐relatedness moderates the relationship between operating routines for new product development teams and innovative performance.

The literature on interfirm networks devotes scant attention to the ways collaborating firms combine and integrate the knowledge they share and to the subsequent learning outcomes. This study aims to investigate how motorsport companies use network ties to share and recombine knowledge and the learning that occurs both at the organizational and dyadic network levels.

The paper adopts a qualitative and inductive approach with the aim of developing theory from an in‐depth examination of the dyadic ties between motorsport companies and the way they share and recombine knowledge.

The research shows that motorsport companies having substantial competences at managing knowledge flows do so by getting advantage of bridging ties. While bridging ties allow motorsport companies to reach distant and diverse sources of knowledge, their strengthening and the formation of relational capital facilitate the mediation and overlapping of that knowledge.

The analysis rests on a qualitative account in a single industry and does not take into account different types of inter‐firm networks (e.g. alliances; constellations; consortia etc.) and governance structures. Cross‐industry analyses may provide a more fine‐grained picture of the practices used to recombine knowledge and the ideal composition of inter‐firm ties.

This study provides some interesting implications for scholars and managers concerned with the management of innovation activities at the interfirm level. From a managerial point of view, the recognition of the different roles played by network spanning connections is particularly salient and raises issues concerning the effective design and management of interfirm ties.

Although much of the literature emphasizes the role of bridging ties in connecting to diverse pools of knowledge, this paper goes one step further and investigates in more depth how firms gather and combine distant and heterogeneous sources of knowledge through the use of strengthened bridging ties and a micro‐context conducive to high quality relationships.