Contextualising the role of external partnerships to innovate the core and enabling processes of an organisation: A resource and knowledge-based view

The knowledge-based view (KBV) theory argues that organisations gain a competitive advantage by adopting strategies to capitalise on their knowledge resources, e.g., organisational culture, managerial decision-making and innovative new processes. Large organisations partner with external technology suppliers to develop such technology-driven processes. However, within the context of large organisations, there remains a lack of insight into the motivation and structures of how and why large organisations collaborate with external partners to create such technology-driven processes. To explore the identified problem of understanding the collaborating mechanisms that contribute to technology-driven process innovation in large manufacturing organisations, we analyse and develop inductive concepts using multiple data points. Our research illustrates that external technology partners act as a mediating influence in process-innovation projects by contributing to the capabilities or capacity of an organisation.