The absorptive capacity for complex, science-based innovation: The case of bio-pharmaceuticals

New products in sectors such as bio-pharmaceuticals, alternate energy, new materials, and complex products require an enormous amount of new knowledge. Yet this knowledge is widely distributed around the globe, so accessing and absorbing it can be very difficult. We focus on how can industrial scientists recognize, pull in, and apply so much new knowledge in their product innovation work. We frame our study with the knowing as practice perspective, which suggests how knowledge professionals draw on their embodied intuition, physical and sensory referents, and on their socially embedded interactions and work contexts. Based on 85 interviews with drug discovery scientists and managers, we develop empirically grounded theory for how these industrial scientists can access and absorb so much knowledge. We find that the collective sense of the scientist is a major medium for drawing on distributed know-how as needed to explore ill-structured problems. The collective sense of the scientist is a complex, intuitive sense that relies on the acting body of the scientist working in the lab with materials and apparatus and using all senses, similar to studies of academic scientists. However, the industrial sense of the scientist is collective - socially created, reinforced, and shared. Our analysis suggests that three social networks together produce and maintain this collective sense by creating a rich social context for knowing: 1) interactions among the sensory bodies of scientists in everyday practice; 2) connections with institutions of sciences; and 3) engagement with the overall innovation process in their firms. We describe each social network, how it works, and how it helps absorb so much knowledge.