Innovation and Interactions: A Bibliometrics Study on intra-firm Coordination

Abstract

The way the firm uses its technological resources and competences, the ability to combine/recombine components, methods, processes and techniques to offer products and services plays a central role on the innovation process (AFUAH, 2002).  As Indarti (2010) points out, the interactions are a key element in the process of gaining access to, acquire, and develop knowledge for the stimulation of a firm’s activities in the field of innovation. From the intra-firm perspective, to innovate, Paruchuri (2010) argues that a firm that can improve the diffusion of knowledge internally will benefit from enhanced innovative activity. Aalbers (2015) reflecting on the governance of knowledge sharing inside organizations, suggest that knowledge may come to be difficult to transfer because of the boundaries dynamics. In light of these authors insights the aim of this paper is to present an overview of the research regarding Interactions, Innovation and Intra-firm Coordination. For that, we performed a bibliometrics study within the Web of Science (WoS) and the Elsevier’s Scopus libraries. A final sample of 111 papers were built after several refinements. The results suggest a growing tendency of the publications on the subject. The most cited papers have a gap of almost twelve years in between it, which shows that the construction of knowledge, about the topics innovation interactions and intra-firm coordination are still attached to what was published a long time ago, for the initiators of this research field, but the works of Dolfsma et al (2008) and Leendert et al (2015) shows us a new trend and that new researchers are using these brand new works as references to perform new studies.