A Study On Building Firm’s Product Innovation Capability In Inter-firm Collaborations

The theme of this dissertation examines how innovation capacity is built in inter-firm collaborations. Over the past three decades, the strategic studies of formation of sustainable competitive advantage for a company is either based on the views of corporate resources, or capacity while recent research is based more on the integration of the two. A lot of researches focused on the relationship between innovation performance and the particularity of internal resources, capabilities and the coordination between the two. The theoretical basis of research related to organizational learning, knowledge management, absorptive capacity, social capital and human capital. Fruitful results has achieved in this field. However, it is puzzling that, with a large number of studies focus on the determinants of innovation performance less studies aim at the formation of the innovative competence of the performance-based innovation. How should an enterprise foster its innovation competence? These problems are less concerned by the researchers. Moreover, most existing studies is discrete, not only without founding on the integration of the relevant theories base, but also lack of local enterprises on the basis of empirical research. It can be said, as a fundamental core issue, the innovation capacity for enterprises has not been completely resolved, and this is one of the important omissions of the current theoretical research of corporate innovation study. Therefore, after the inducting, analyzing and concluding process of the relevant theoretical research, this dissertation extracted a theoretical framework for product innovation capacity on the basis of the external knowledge acquisition, internal knowledge management and knowledge application process in inter-firm collaborations context. Relevant literature is integrated and a relational model for empirical research has been developed. In this dissertation, the data from the survey of more than 150 companies is used to testify the empirical model. Based on proven path of the model elements, this dissertation further validate significant positive effect between product innovation capacity and the inter-firm collaborations in the enterprise knowledge acquisition, knowledge processing and knowledge application. The corporate knowledge acquisition from outside also has obvious regulatory role in the inner application and processing of knowledge in building of innovative competence. Positive test results also show that in the process of cooperation, the higher the intensity of interaction between organizations, the higher level of trust between organizations, the more they facilitate cooperation in the process of knowledge acquisition; The higher the level of participating in the process of cooperation within the enterprise’s knowledge management task team, the more help for companies to improve their product innovation capacity. Overall, the dissertation meets the expectations, not only testifying some of the points in the previous studies, but also finding some new ideas. Therefore, this dissertation deepens and expands the existing theories. Meanwhile, the empirical part of this dissertation is based on case studies of local enterprises and empirical data, so a certain guiding significance for the practice of the enterprise can be realized.The innovative work of this study can be summarized as followings:First, from the theoretical perspective, this study integrates the related theoretical literature of organizational learning, knowledge management, absorptive capacity, social capital and human capital and brings out the corresponding research framework and expands the relative researches. The research framework makes a theoretical distinction between "knowledge transfer between enterprises (enterprise knowledge acquisition)" and "enterprise capacity building". In other words, by cooperation aiming at accessing external knowledge, competence of the enterprise will not be promoted automatically, but through the knowledge processing and application, the purpose of enhancing business capabilities of a enterprise can be achieved. In this study makes up such defects of the exclusive focusing of the learning process in cooperation, or of concerning only about the cooperation in the separation of knowledge management so as to contribute to inter-organizational learning, organizational learning, knowledge management integration in a unified framework and to deepen the organizational learning and the study of the relationship between knowledge management and firm’s capability building.Second, based on construction of the theoretical basis, this study aims to the integration of social capital and human capital theory literature, deepening the understanding of relevant theoretical perspectives. The empirical results show that compared to some previous studies with more emphasis on cooperation motivation, differences of the enterprise in cooperation and knowledge relevant to the cooperation purposes (such as the degree of implicit of the knowledge), other factors like cooperation intensity of inter-organizational interaction and mutual trust have more significant impact on knowledge transfer between enterprises. This result, at least indirectly supports the point of view that "network of external relations and its quality are key elements in the firm’s capacity building process,"Third, for the three main processes of building of firm’s capacity, the empirical results of this study also found that enterprises in the process of the inter-firm collaborations, knowledge acquisition from outside the process acts as an obvious regulatory role for capacity building within the inner application of knowledge processing and knowledge, which also indirectly support the theoretical proposition that "the initial phase of capacity building is conducted through cooperation or alliance and cumulative learning while enterprise learning and accumulation is to further pursue the endogen tic development of the enterprise".Fourth, this study constructs a structural relationship model which is related to internal and external organizations learning, knowledge characteristics and knowledge management, organizational structure and organizational ability, absorptive capacity, human capital within and out of the organization etc. This originality is the special feature at this study which is useful for the follow-up study for the further development and improvement. At the same time, this study develops the corresponding variables on the basis of the structural model and corresponding measurement for these variables is based on the extensive literature summary. These are quite significant and inspirational for the follow-up studies.