"Codified and Tacit Knowledge and the International Business of Technology Adoption"

Business firms operating in globally distributed industries compete on the basis of their ability to adopt new technologies as they become available. In the aggregate, repeated iterations of technology adoption by firms reveal patterns of technology diffusion. But what shapes firms’ ability to adopt? Although the literature on adoption, diffusion, firms’ technological capacity, and technology transfer is large, there is less empirical work on the relative roles of codified and tacit knowledge in determining firm-level capacity. This paper uses the global diffusion of cyaniding in gold and silver refining to differentiate firm-level strategies to acquire the requisite codified and tacit knowledge.