Customer Firms’ Resistance and Innovation of Entrepreneurial Supplier Firms in the Blockchain Industry: The Mediating Role of Knowledge Assimilation

The extant scholarship has concentrated on the macro-level interorganizational interactions within business-to-business (B2B) relationships. However, granular-level phenomena, particularly the resistive behaviors of individual B2B relationship managers, have not been adequately scrutinized. Grounded in resource dependence theory, the study examines the ramifications of B2B relationship manager resistance within customer firms on acquiring customer knowledge by entrepreneurial suppliers, with subsequent implications for product innovation. An empirical analysis of data from 135 entrepreneurial entities within the nascent blockchain industry indicates that the resistance from customer firms’ B2B relationship managers exerts a substantive detrimental effect on the supplier's innovation outcomes, a process that is mediated by the diminished assimilation of customer knowledge. This article further discerns two salient organizational competencies—customer involvement capability and relational capability—as moderating variables that can attenuate the negative repercussions of B2B relationship manager resistance. By shedding light on the mediating function of customer knowledge assimilation and addressing the impact of individual-level resistance in the specific milieu of an emergent technological field, this study augments the corpus of B2B literature, offering novel insights into the intricate dynamics at the microinteractional level.