The processes for absorbing external knowledge become an essential element for innovation in firms and in adapting to changes in the competitive environment. Despite the huge growth in the absorptive capacity literature, a methodological gap still remains about a certain ambiguity in the...

Summary This paper takes a cross-level approach in contributing to defining the competences accumulated and shared in an industrial district, and to explaining how they differ from firm-specific, knowledge-based capacities. From a dataset of 952 Spanish firms and 35 industrial districts, we...