Research summary. The network resources a firm can access through its strategic alliances are critical precursors to innovation: they provide the information and know-how needed to generate new knowledge. Yet prior literature has not directly considered the congestion of network resources...

A firm that lacks the specialized complementary assets necessary to commercialize an innovation faces a trade-off between contracting with an incumbent to access those assets and integrating downstream into commercialization. According to the framework developed in the prior literature, under a...

We empirically investigate a type of technological boundary spanning-oriented search in which firms apply knowledge from one technical domain to innovate in another, a phenomenon we term knowledge bridging. In an analysis of a novel dataset of all the biotechnology firms founded to commercialize...