Knowledge sharing, social capital, and financial performance: the perspectives of innovation strategy in technological clusters

The paper explores knowledge sharing and social capital as antecedents of innovation strategy at the firm level and investigates its effect on financial performance while also considering customer satisfaction. The proposed hypotheses were empirically tested by examining a sample of 209 technology firms in Taiwan science parks. Using the structural equation model, the results show the firm’s knowledge sharing and social capital shape the innovation strategies, including collaborative, in-house, and outsourcing, and highlight the positive impacts of collaborative and in-house innovation strategies on customer satisfaction which positively affects financial performance. We find the purposive and selective impact of knowledge sharing on different strategies and its uneven effects on performance via the lens of strategies choice. Evidence implies a firm with a hybrid (ambidexterity) in strategy enhances the complementarity via balancing and mitigating contradictory ingredients between internal and external knowledge acquisition, which in turn improves its customer satisfaction and financial performance.