This study examines how the patterns of acquiring unfamiliar technological knowledge from other organizations influence on innovation. Absorptive capacity perspective emphasizes the importance of overlaps in knowledge acquisition. This study focuses on the degree of market and technological knowledge overlaps between a firm that would like to get new technological knowledge and a firm that has new technological knowledge. This study presents four knowledge acquisition types based on technological and market knowledge overlaps and uses the Japanese chemical firms (from 2002 to 2008) and patent data from (2003 to 2009) for the empirical analysis. The findings are that (1) high market and high technological overlaps improves innovation and (2) low market and high technological overlaps improves innovation and (3) high market and low technological overlaps harms innovation.

Despite higher levels of R&D investment, Japanese companies continue to have lower IT investments than other advanced countries. Some attribute this to the low productivity growth rate and lost decade. Therefore, this paper studied the differences between the IT investments in Japan and the USA by accessing an open database to show the reason for these phenomena. Moreover, this set the hypotheses based on the findings from the above study and clarified the mechanism to generate these differences through the verification processes of the hypotheses. By interpreting the result and considering service innovations, this showed some proposals for future approach for IT usage. This paper used a two-sided market model to set and verify the hypotheses, while showing that two-sided market model is a useful approach for the future IT usage.