Crossing Firm Boundaries: How Boundary Spanners Search Over Time and Across Organizational Contexts

The success of open innovation depends on the individuals that stand at the interface of the firm and its external partners. These boundary spanners need to cultivate external search processes by searching broadly and deeply across knowledge sources, as well as transfer ideas and knowledge from external sources to their home organizations. While prior work has generated important insights into the performance implications of external search breadth, this research has remained largely cross-sectional in nature and we have limited insights into the temporal dynamics of external search openness. This study adopts a temporal perspective and makes three contributions to the literature on individual-level openness. First, we identify search trajectories and systematically analyze to what extent both external search breadth and depth can be explained by differences within individuals (over time) versus differences between individuals (that are constant across time). Second, adopting an attention-based view we investigate the influence of organizational context and context changes on individual-level search trajectories. And third, we provide some first insights into how external search trajectories relate to the amount of knowledge transferred from external sources to the home organization.