TY - JOUR TI - The roles of knowledge complexity and location complexity for the structure of knowledge building in a global environment DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T36T0QRS PY - 2017 AB - Scholars have long studied the complexity of knowledge in innovation. More recently, research has begun to focus attention on the role of knowledge recombination as a way to understand knowledge complexity, knowledge growth, and evolutionary search. Yet little is known about knowledge complexity in the broad context of globalization. We build on knowledge recombination patterns in global innovation activities to develop our theory of the relationship through which earlier contributions to knowledge become inputs to subsequent knowledge building that generates more or less complex knowledge artifacts. We propose that knowledge complexity rises when recombined elements are sourced across two dimensions of distance, characterized by combining sources taken from disparate knowledge fields and distinct geographical locations. The study draws upon and compares three alternative ways of measuring the complexity of technological knowledge through patent data. This dissertation establishes two new methods for measuring complexity and adapts a third measure for wider applicability in research. Study 1 results show there no clear relationship between technological distance and complexity as measured through either co-classification or cross-classification data. We establish the growth of the ICT era has also facilitated increases in knowledge complexity while the turbulence from ICT is indirectly increasing knowledge complexity. We end this study with a direct comparison of two measures for knowledge complexity to establish which aspects of complexity each best reflects. In study 2, we find increasing knowledge complexity also increases locational complexity. Digging deeper we see there are divergent effects from the use of both knowledge complexity measures when investigating locational complexity which further establishes the uniqueness of each knowledge complexity measure. We further assess the representative distinguishing characteristics of each complexity measure. We also establish here that ICT is contributing to increasing locational complexity as ICT is a connector of both technology fields and geographic locations. In study 3 we examine the outliers of the relationships examined for each complexity measure. KW - Management KW - Knowledge management LA - eng ER -