Temporal attention, knowledge breadth, and firm growth
研究管理者的时间注意力如何影响企业利用广泛知识组合创造的新技术资源，进而影响企业成长，发现长期注意力有助于更好利用复杂技术并促进增长。
This study integrates the attention-based view with Edith Penrose’s theory of growth to examine how the interplay between managerial attention and newly created technological resources influences firm growth. I draw upon research showing that combining broad types of knowledge during R&D creates new technological resources that are potentially valuable, and also relatively complex and ambiguous, making them challenging to utilize effectively. I theorize that attention’s temporal orientation shapes how managers understand complex technologies and construe opportunities for their use. I hypothesize that a shorter-term attentional focus is incongruent with broad knowledge combination, resulting in a less effective and more incremental use of newly created, complex technologies and lower levels of growth. Conversely, a longer-term attentional focus helps managers understand and identify novel, strategic opportunities for such complex technologies, leading to comparatively higher levels of growth. Analysis supports these predictions using a panel data set of 327 firms between 2003 and 2017.