General purpose technology R&D specialization and supply chain cross-industry expansion: The moderation effect of technology portfolio breadth and depth

Abstract

Since the general purpose technology (GPT) was first introduced, scholars have shown great interest in its giant impact and have extensively discussed its diffusion and commercialization within whole industry supply chain. However, few studies explore how GPT R&D of a firm incentives its collaboration with new cross-industry partners and thus expands its own supply chain. Drawing on innovational complementarities of GPTs and the technology spillover theory, this study focuses on the concept of “specialization” as the main source of complementarities, and investigates the nonlinear relationship between a firm's specialization in GPT R&D and its cross-industry supply chain expansion. Based on a sample of 297 “firm-year” observations from 45 top firms during the period 2010–2019, the empirical results suggest that a firm's GPT R&D specialization has an inverted U-shape impact on its supply chain cross-industry expansion. Furthermore, its technology portfolio breadth moderates the inverted U-shaped relationship in the way that the higher the breadth, the flatter the inverted U-shaped curve. However, the effect of technology portfolio depth is opposite, yet statistically insignificant. The findings provide new insights into how GPT R&D reconfigures supply chain collaboration from the perspective of innovation complementarities. They also guide the firm to configure a moderate level of GPT R&D specialization and a lower level of technology portfolio breadth to achieve better performance in supply chain cross-industry expansion.