Влияние взаимодействия с клиентами на инновационную активность компаний сектора интеллектуальных услугThe Impact of Customer Interactions on Innovation Activities in Knowledge-Intensive Business Services

One of the main features of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) is frequent client interactions that pursue the intensive creation and sharing of knowledge which magnitude is still being underexplored. To fill this gap, this study aims at investigating how the capacity of KIBS firms to absorb client knowledge influences on the implementation of business innovations in KIBS. Using two unique datasets on Russian KIBS surveyed by HSE ISSEK in 2015 and 2019, the findings show that each of the three main dimensions of the client knowledge absorptive capacity (i.e. acquisition, assimilation and application of client knowledge) is a key factor which is positively associated with the implementation of business innovation in KIBS. Moreover, these effects are observed for both product and business process innovations. These results suggest that innovation activity of KIBS may be supported by acquiring client knowledge through the digital communication channels, by assimilating this knowledge via using more formal IT-enhanced approaches to manage explicit and implicit knowledge, and by extending the areas for its further application.