What Drives Successful Innovation Strategies: HRM Practices and Firms Absorptive Capacity

Abstract

This article aims at deepening our understanding of the relationships between human resources management (HRM) and absorptive capacity in the context of innovation. We assume that different kinds of innovations may require different absorptive processes, sustained by pertinent HRM practices. Following the extant literature, we distinguish between flexible HRM practices and bureaucratic HRM practices. Based on a qualitative study in three French industrial firms, we find that firms pursuing “new-to-the-firm” innovations rely predominantly on flexible HRM practices, while firms pursuing new-to-the-world” innovations rather rely on bureaucratic HRM practices. We explain this finding by the fact that “new-to-the-firm” innovations call for swift redeployment of resources across projects, while “new-to-the-world” innovations entail the management of interdependencies across disparate bodies of knowledge.