La capacité d'absorption : une nouvelle conceptualisation à travers l'intelligence économique

Prior information systems research highlights the vital role of information and knowledge in explaining firms' performance. At the same time, innovation literature has shown that accessing and integrating knowledge from sources that reside outside the firm, such as customers, competitors, universities, or consultants, are criticals to firms' success innovation. In this paper, we draw on the knowledge-based view of the firm to investigate how firms absorb relevant information from their external sources, and its exploitation through its activities. The study seeks to improve our understanding of the development of the absorption capacity through the concept of Business Intelligence. Our model is tested a sample of 145 employees of French SMEs. We use the structural equation method to empirically validate our model. The results show that Business Intelligence has a positive effect on the enhancement of absorption capacity of French SMEs.