Searching in the Non-market Environment: The Impact of Regulatory Search on Firm Innovativeness (WITHDRAWN)

Abstract

This paper investigated the relationship between regulatory search and firm innovativeness in a contingency framework. First, regulatory search was conceptualized as a non-local and exploratory knowledge acquisition capability in a firm’s non-market environment, specifically, the regulatory environment. Second, a self-developed scale was used to measure regulatory search and the results suggested that the non-local search conducted in the regulatory environment formed two independent factors, namely, reactive and proactive regulatory search, aligning with firms’ non-market strategies of positive anticipation/compliance and proactive participation/influence respectively. Third, a contingency analysis of the regulatory search-innovativeness link conditioned on a firm’s internal resource munificence (proxied by slack) was conducted. We found that slack moderated the relationship between the two regulatory search factors and innovativeness in different manners. Specifically, under a high (low) slack environme...