The influence of socialisation and absorptive capacity on buyer’s innovation performance

In contrast to prior literature, we hypothesise that socialisation with suppliers plays a key role in the success of buyer’s innovation programmes. Using the theoretical lens of social capital theory and knowledge-based view of a firm; we propose a framework of antecedents and consequences of socialisation. We use data from a large sample of firms in Australia to test our framework. We also corroborate our results with a small sample of qualitative case studies that were carried out in conjunction with the large-scale empirical study. Taken together, the results supported the claim of the importance of socialisation as well as absorptive capacity in influencing innovation performance of buyers. The results suggest that managers ought to consider socialisation as a mechanism to enhance collaborative competence which in turn helps innovation performance via tapping the potential of absorptive capacity of knowledge.