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From Knowledge To Competitive Advantage - A Social Capital Perspective

Posted on:2006-03-07Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:S Y JiangFull Text:PDF
GTID:2206360152980984Subject:Business management
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
This paper starts from considering the tendency that J. Schumpeter's innovation theory has been recovering during the past decades. After detailed studies, the paper believes that the development of innovation theory relates to specialization inside firms. The requirement of entrepreneurship is also the demand of building sustainable competitive advantages. The paper points out that the force behind Schumpeter's innovative firms is social capital.As the development of specialization and labor-division, it makes individual innovations more and more difficult. Clusters become the most popular innovation model. Trust, network and norms brought by social capital lead to innovative clusters. The knowledge-sharing amongst cluster members makes individual enterprise more competitive and those outside uncompetitive. To sum up, social capital accelerates innovations in all levels. Traditional strategic management theories failed to realize the mechanism of innovations and actually failed to build long term competitive advantages. Essentially, social capital builds sustainable advantages by push innovations.This paper reviews the origin and development of social capital, which makes further discussion possible from the perspective of social capital. The paper distinguishes two kinds of firms: classical firms as Schumpeter defined and modern firms that are defined in knowledge-based economy. This paper discusses how social capital works during the process of transferring knowledge to competitive advantages.This paper imports social capital as the informal factor into the analysis framework through the institutional methodology as was advocated by D. North, by which we can look into innovation issues more deeply. The conclusion is that social capital is the essential factor for the development of competitive advantages, which will lead Chinese large enterprises to find the direct way to build long term competitive advantages.
Keywords/Search Tags:Social capital, Innovation, Cluster effect
PDF Full Text Request
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