Purpose – This paper aims to ask the question of the contingency of a firm’s absorptive capacity upon the type of expected outcome. Thus, this paper looks at different expected outputs in terms of more or less radical innovations and sees if there are consequences on the absorptive process...

This contribution focuses on the simulation of the emergence and evolution of communities of practice, a concept brought forwards originally in sociology in the early 90’s by Lave and Wenger (1990) and Brown and Duguid (1991). In a first part, the main theoretical principles on which relies...

This article, which draws on recent literature on organizational communities, raises the question of the coherence of the firm through the analysis of the dialectic interaction between hierarchies and Knowledge-Intensive Communities (KnICs) within the firm. Focusing on the cognitive dimension of...