Knowledge Searching, Integrating and Performing: always a tuned Trio for Innovation?

External search strategies remain ineffective without the ability of the firm to communicate and share internally what has been absorbed from the environment. Most of the empirical studies have mainly discussed this complementarity between knowledge search and internal knowledge processing capabilities by looking at the last ones in terms of spending in R&D. In so doing, these studies have thus only marginally examined the internal practices that may facilitate an effective use of external knowledge. The intention of the paper is to enrich this debate by illustrating that over-search may lie in an inadequate alignment between the practices used to search for knowledge outside the firm and the practices firms use to build effective linkages and coordination mechanisms among the internal sources of innovative knowledge.