Absorptive capacity: a non-linear process

Since the Cohen and Levinthal article on absorptive capacity was published, ‘the ability to recognize the value of new information, to assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends’ (p. 128) is seen as an essential competence for a firm’s long-term performance. However, the way absorptive capacity is actually implemented in firms remains relatively poorly known. The few existing works present absorptive capacity as an essentially linear process, and the way the different phases of this process are actually carried out remains understudied. In order to enhance our understanding of the way firms absorb external knowledge, we gathered data from 23 interviews of managers from three different industrial firms. Our results suggest that, far from being linear, the process displays several feedback loops, both within and between each phase of absorption. In this study, we enrich previous absorptive capacity models.