'Guanxi' as a shock Absorber: Lessening the detrimental effect of Structural Holes on the Acquisition and Integration of Knowledge

China’s digital ventures are becoming increasingly popular on the global landscape, attracting signif-icant attention on their digital innovation ecosystem; meanwhile, the reduction of communication cost and the convergence of digital technology are distributing the control over innovation activities and amplifying the knowledge heterogeneity, inducing a serious challenge. Facing this problem, collaborative knowledge activities could provide a solution, but in China, there is very limited under-standing of this due to the existence of “guanxi”influential relationships in Chinese culture. To address the gap, we adopt a mixed-methods research approach to explore how guanxi and structural holes affect knowledge acquisition and knowledge integration among Chinese digital ventures at dif-ferent stages in doubly distributed innovation networks. Our findings indicate that guanxi fosters the acquisition and integration of knowledge by creating a buffer zone, around which knowledge re-sources flow in the form of favor exchange, ‘renqing’ (favor) accumulation, and ‘mianzi’ (face) preservation. Hence we make three contributions: 1) recognizing guanxi as a shock absorber to lessen the detrimental impacts induced by excessive structural holes situated in innovation networks; 2) iden-tifying the significance of integrators in Chinese culture; 3) uncovering when and what type of guanxi is utilized the most for China’s digital ventures.