Knowledge-based Firm's Social Capital And Performance Of Technological Innovation

With the development of economic globalization, firms will win competitive advantage by continuous learning, knowledge creation and improving innovation capability, not only by the possession of scarce resources. However, any firm cannot satisfy the need of innovation resources only depending upon its internal limited resources. Firms, therefore, are striding forward to open, collaborative, network and dynamic integration in order to effectively make use of their internal and external resources.By combining the theory of social capital with the theory of innovation, this dissertation is to systematically analyze the relationship between firm's social capital and the performance of innovation from the structural and relational dimension. On the basis of reviewing much related literature, it points that the agent of innovation has become multi-agent model from single-agent model because of firm's social capital. Secondly, starting from the 3 components of social capital, this thesis is to systematically analyze how firm's social capital affects the performance of innovation by influencing information acquisition, knowledge acquisition and capital acquisition. Furthermore, it is to construct the theoretical framework in order to open the "black box" of how firms' social capital affects the performance of innovation. Finally, through questionnaire survey and empirical analysis on 210 knowledge-based firms in China, this paper analyzes in detail the mechanism of how firm's social capital affects the performance of innovation recurring to SPSS and ANN (Artificial Neural Network).The empirical result shows that firm's social capital affects the performance of innovation undoubtedly by influencing information acquisition, knowledge acquisition and capital acquisition as following:Firstly, through multi-regression analysis, it draws the conclusion of that the vertical relation capital is the most important, the social relation capital the less important and the horizontal relation capital the least important factor which affects information acquisition. Among the factors affecting knowledge acquisition, the vertical relation capital is the most important, the social relation capital the lesser important and the horizontal relation capital the least important factor. Among the factors influencing capital acquisition, the socialrelation capital is the most important, the horizontal relation capital lesser important and the vertical relation capital the least important factor.Secondly, among resource acquisitions that affect the performance of innovation, knowledge acquisition is the most important, information acquisition the lesser important and capital acquisition the least important factor.Thirdly, through BP neural network analysis, it reaches the conclusion of that the vertical relation capital, the horizontal relation capital and the social relation capital can promote the acquisition of information. There exists different relationship between these three relation capitals and knowledge acquisition at different phase. That is, when these capitals are at the lower phase, there is no distinct relativity between them and knowledge acquisition. However, when these capitals accumulate to some extent, they can improve the acquisition of knowledge. The vertical relation capital and the social relation capital play a positive role in promoting the acquisition of capital, but there is no distinct relativity between the horizontal relation capital and capital acquisition.Finally, information and knowledge acquisition can promote the performance of innovation. Capital acquisition can only improve the performance of innovation at some phase. That is, when the capital is in scarcity, there exists distinct relativity between capital acquisition and the performance of innovation. However, when the capital acquisition arrives at some extent, there is no distinct relativity between them. It shows that enough capital is necessary to innovate and not sufficient for any firm to promote performance of innovation.