To remain competitive worldwide, firms need to focus on their knowledge-based activities and possess specific abilities that allow them to unravel their potential to innovate. This need has led to an increasing interest in understanding the factors that allow a firm to develop its innovation capability. However, given the complexity of the phenomenon, there is no consensus on the nature and definition of innovation capability. Moreover, most existent studies have focused on studying innovation as a psychometric phenomenon; however, this approach neglects the social dimension of the construct. Thus, an exploratory study is conducted to examine a firm’s capability to innovate from a sociometric perspective. To achieve this objective, 61 surveys were distributed in the biotechnology area of a Mexican university. In addition, informal relations and knowledge sharing are analyzed as determinants of innovation capability. Since, the multiple regression quadratic assignment procedure (MRQAP) is applied.The results reveal that friendship relations become the base for knowledge sharing and, at the same time, this factor positively impacts a firm’s innovation capability.

为了保持全球竞争力，公司需要专注于基于知识的活动并拥有特定的能力，使他们能够发挥创新的潜力。这种需求导致人们对了解使企业发展其创新能力的因素的兴趣日益浓厚。但是，鉴于现象的复杂性，对于创新能力的性质和定义尚无共识。此外，大多数现有的研究都集中于研究创新作为一种心理计量现象。但是，这种方法忽略了构造的社会维度。因此，进行了一项探索性研究，从社会计量的角度考察了企业的创新能力。为了实现这一目标，在一所墨西哥大学的生物技术领域进行了61次调查。此外，分析非正式关系和知识共享是创新能力的决定因素。由于采用了多元回归二次赋值程序（MRQAP），研究结果表明友谊关系成为知识共享的基础，同时，这一因素也对企业的创新能力产生了积极影响。