Absorptive capacity (AC) serves as an important component of a manufacturer’s learning capabilities by creating a set of organisational routines and processes (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990; Zahra and George, 2002). It can help a manufacturer develop new knowledge as well as adapt existing knowledge into new applications (Lane et al., 2006; Lawson and Potter, 2012; Nagati and Rebolledo, 2012; Whitehead et al., 2016). Researchers report that AC is positively associated with a manufacturer’s performance and capabilities (Tu et al., 2006; Francalanci and Morabito, 2008; Kauppi et al., 2013; Tavani et al., 2014; Iyengar et al., 2015), including product innovation (Cepeda-Carrion et al., 2012; Ritala and Hurmelinna-Laukkanen, 2013; Saenz et al., 2014). Both mediation (Francalanci and Morabito, 2008; Cepeda-Carrion et al., 2012; Setia and Patel, 2013; Saenz et al., 2014; Iyengar et al., 2015) and moderation (Patel et al., 2012; Kauppi et al., 2013; Ritala and Hurmelinna-Laukkanen, 2013; Tavani et al., 2014) models have been used to empirically investigate the relationships between AC and performance outcomes. However, the contingent conditions that influence AC’s effect on product innovation have been overlooked in previous research. The sociotechnical systems theory proposes that a firm is composed of both social and technical systems (Pasmore, 1988). They should be treated as interdependent aspects of an organisation and be jointly designed according to internal and external environments (Pasmore, 1988; Huber and Brown, 1991). Trust and information systems reflect the social and technical aspects of an organisational system (Mayer et al., 1995; Alavi and Leidner, 2001). An organisational design that only considers one of the two aspects will be inefficient for knowledge absorption and product innovation (Huber and Brown, 1991; Lane et al., 2006). In addition, a knowledge-based view of the firm argues that firms can gain competitive advantages by combining and creating tacit and explicit knowledge and they have different properties and require different mechanisms for absorption (Nonaka, 1994; Zhang et al., 2015). Trust and information systems provide two mechanisms governing the flows and applications of tacit and explicit knowledge, respectively (Malhotra et al., 2005; Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998; Roberts et al., 2012). Trust enables employees to access each other’s private experiences and build a social system for them to share know-how, facilitating the socialisation and externalisation of tacit knowledge (Nonaka, 1994). Trust also motivates cooperative behaviour and reduces opportunism in cross-functional collaboration, which promotes joint learning (Yeung et al., 2009; Zahra and George, 2002). Information systems facilitate a firm to analyse, distribute and record large amount of information quickly and efficiently, and hence provide a technical system to combine and internalise explicit knowledge (Nonaka, 1994; Setia and Patel, 2013). Researchers argue that social integration mechanisms can build connectedness and shared meaning among employees which facilitate the free flow of knowledge (Zahra and George, 2002; Todorova and Durisin, 2007) and that the synergies between information technologies and AC affect firm performance (Roberts et al., 2012). However, there is a lack of explanation of how trust and information systems jointly affect knowledge absorption and how they influence the effects of AC remains underaddressed (Hotho et al., 2012; Marabelli and Newell, 2014; Iyengar et al., 2015). In addition, Volberda et al.