This study bridges corporate strategy, organizational structure, and innovation research to explore the interplay between the centralization of an organization’s R&D decision-making and its external knowledge sourcing. We propose that the intra-organizational decision-making of an organization plays an important role in its external knowledge exploration strategy, specifically in determining the organization’s technology sourcing from its alliance partners. Analyses of technology alliances in the bio-pharmaceutical industry indicate that organizations with centralized R&D decision-making tend to search more extensively from their alliance partners and tend to leverage this knowledge to a wider extent. In particular, we show that organizations with centralized R&D decision-making source knowledge from their alliance partners beyond the scope of the focal alliance and that they are better able to use the externally sourced technologies in a wider range of technological areas within the organization compared to organizations with decentralized R&D decision-making.
