Speaker：Dr Bingxin LI

Site：B129

Time：9：30-10：30 Tuesday Dec.12 2017

This article addresses a central question in relationship marketing: How do firms learn from a relationship? Although learning and knowledge are believed to play a significant role in inter-firm relationships, relatively little is known about how collaborators actually interact with each other in a way of influencing their intents to learn from the relationship. In this study, we argue that the effect of customer firm cooperation on absorptive capacity is contingent on the nature of the relationship. Our findings, based on a dyadic dataset collected from a longitudinal research design, show that both customer and focal firms are more proactive in building absorptive capacity when they perceive the challenge of learning completion, as reflected in high risk of knowledge leakage to the partner; whereas becomes contented with the current status of relationship and less motivated to invest in learning when the relationship sustains harmonious and stable. Additionally, the coexistence of focal firm and customer firm’s absorptive capacity has a positive synergetic effect on solution innovativeness. Further, we find that operational integration, as an implementation mechanism, helps firms to leverage absorptive capacity for innovative solution output.