Partners’ partners matter: the effect of partners’ centrality diversity on the focal organization’s innovation outputs

Despite the importance of partner diversity in managing the innovation process, prior studies mainly focus on characteristics within an organization. Our understanding of how diversity among partners’ network structures can affect the focal organization’s innovation outputs is still limited. This study addresses the above research gap by developing a model that explains how partners’ centrality diversity affects the focal organization’s innovation outputs and investigates the influencing mechanisms in depth by introducing knowledge diversity as a mediator and knowledge distance as a moderator. We select data of the smartphone collaboration network from 2004 to 2017. The regression results suggest that partners’ centrality diversity has an inverted U-shaped relationship with exploratory innovation and positively affects exploitative innovation. Additionally, knowledge diversity mediates the effect of the partners’ centrality diversity on exploratory innovation. The findings also indicate that knowledge distance weakens the effect of the partners’ centrality diversity on knowledge diversity.