Many firms failing to catch the leader

Feb 23, 2018

Great article from Brian Fallow at the NZ Herald reporting on research by Motu's Trinh Le and the Productivity Commission with Richard Harris from Durham University

"It is fundamental to our success as a species that we learn from each other. If we only knew what we had figured out for ourselves from scratch, well, there would not be 7 billion of us for a start.

Something of the sort is true of businesses as well. What economists call "absorptive capacity" — a firm's ability to acquire, adapt and utilise knowledge from external sources — is crucial to lifting productivity." More...