1794 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT, VOL. 70, NO. 5, MAY2023 Knowledge Filters and Employee Venturing Behaviors: A Cross-Institutional Study of the U.S. and Indian Firms Menglei Gu, Chengli Shu , and Dirk De Clercq Abstract—This article develops an attention-based view of orga- nizational knowledge filters and it explains the theoretical roots for their existence, typology, and boundary conditions of influ- encing knowledge spillovers (i.e., employee venturing behaviors). Although prior studies have examined the roles of institutional factors in the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship (KSTE), it still lacks insights into whether and how the core propo- sition of the KSTE—the impact of knowledge filters on knowl- edge spillovers—differs across nations. Based on the analysis of a dataset of the U.S. and Indian firms collected from LinkedIn, this cross-institutional study reveals that though knowledge-creating firms’ cultural knowledge filters and capability knowledge filters both relate positively to employee venturing behaviors, the latter has a stronger impact than the former, across the U.S. and Indian firms. Due to different economic and cultural institutions, cultural knowledge filters exhibit a stronger impact on employee venturing behaviors in the U.S. firms, whereas the influence of capability knowledge filters is stronger in Indian firms. Index Terms—Attention-based view (ABV), capability knowledge filters, cultural knowledge filters, employee venturing behaviors, institutions. I. INTRODUCTION K NOWLEDGE and technology commercialization consti- tutes an indispensable part of the technology management process and becomes a key source of a firm’s competitive ad- vantage [1], [2]. In light of this, firms are enthusiastic to invest heavily in creating new knowledge and advancing technological frontiers, but little attention has been paid to the fact that a substantial portion of firm knowledge remains undercommer- cialized [3]. Building on endogenous growth models [4], the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship (KSTE) aims to explicate why there exists a gap between the amount of knowledge being created and the amount being commercialized, Manuscript received 10 July 2020; revised 4 December 2020 and 17 January 2021; accepted 8 March 2021. Date of publication 14 April 2021; date of current version 17 March 2023. This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 71972150, and in part by China Scholarship Council under Grant 202006280370. Review of this manuscript was arranged by Department Editor M. Dabic. (Corresponding author: Chengli Shu.) Menglei Gu and Chengli Shu are with the School of Management, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, China (e-mail: mengleigu@gmail.com; cljshu@xjtu.edu.cn). Dirk De Clercq is with the Goodman School of Business, Brock University, St. Catharines, ON L2S 3A1, Canada (e-mail: ddeclercq@brocku.ca). Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TEM.2021.3065955 and how the undercommercialized knowledge becomes a source of entrepreneurial opportunities [3], [5]. The gap exists because of organizational knowledge filters, which are defined as barriers that hinder firms from fully commercializing their proprietary knowledge [6]–[9]. The KSTE posits that the underexploited knowledge offers employees at the knowledge-creating firm entrepreneurial opportunities to start a new business to com- mercialize that knowledge but without fully compensating the firm, which generates a particular form of knowledge spillovers [10]–[12]. Knowledge spillovers are defined by KSTE scholars as “the external benefits from knowledge creation that is enjoyed by parties other than the party investing in the creation” [11]. The phenomena of such employees quitting to start a new business are employee venturing behaviors [5]. Although scholars have investigated the impact of knowledge filters on knowledge spillovers at interfirm [13], regional [7], [9], [14], and national levels [3], [15], our understanding of knowledge filters at firm level remains limited. First, the extant literature lacks a sound theoretical foundation for explaining why organizational knowledge filters exist. In the KSTE, knowl- edge filters exist because knowledge creators or employees hold divergent views of the value of the newly created knowledge with decision-makers who determine whether to exploit the knowledge or not [5], [8]. Although this approach explains the existence of knowledge filters from a phenomenological point of view, it ignores their ontological basis: that is, why the divergent views between knowledge creators/employees and decision-makers exist. To date, we still lack a solid theoretical explanation for why knowledge filters especially exist in firms, which inhibits the examinations of their true value in the KSTE framework. Second, the conceptualization of knowledge filters as “con- straints resulting from existing organizational capabilities, ori- entation, or cognition” [7] indicates that knowledge filters could exist in firms and are multifaceted. But to the best of our knowl- edge, few studies have directly assessed knowledge filters at firm level except the work by Shu et al. [5], which however treats knowledge filters as a unidimensional construct. Knowledge commercialization is a complex process, involving a set of skills, capabilities, aptitudes, and cognitive structures to recognize the value of a piece of knowledge, and the motivation and capability to exploit that knowledge [2], [6]. As such, the barriers impeding firms’ knowledge commercialization, i.e., knowledge filters, can 0018-9391 © 2021 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See https://www.ieee.org/publications/rights/index.html for more information. Authorized licensed use limited to: Brock University. Downloaded on November 05,2024 at 19:12:56 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.