Research on dimensions of team absorptive capacity in inter-organizational scientific collaboration

Inter-organizational scientific collaboration is a key mechanism for converging diverse teams specializing at different domains into novel ideas and breakthroughs. Other domain-specific knowledge is important to teams´ individual innovative work. Inspired by the theories of knowledge management across boundaries, we define team absorptive capacity as an ability of coping with increasingly challenging boundaries, which are syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic, to make better use of other domains´ knowledge. In accordance with this definition, three dimensions are discussed then: process, common knowledge, absorptive capacity of boundary spanners. These dimensions are complementary to each other, and depict different aspects of team absorptive capacity. The definition and dimensions of team absorptive capacity are also shown to be more coincident with the practical scientific collaboration circumstances.