Research On Knowledge Sharing And Protection Mechanisms Of Enterprises Within Inter-organizational Collaboration

Under the current complex and dynamic environment, knowledge is the criticalcore assets of enterprises and the significant strategic resource of enterprises to keepsustainable competitive advantages. It’s more and more difficult for internalknowledge innovation to support the survival and development of enterprises on theirown, so seeking external complementary resources across the organizationcooperation has become an important way of enterprises to adapt to the environmentfor innovation. For enterprises, inter-organizational collaboration makes up for theproblem of limited ability to create knowledge on their own, and helps expandknowledge interface, thus it becomes an effective way to obtain the externalknowledge complementary. When enterprises participate in the alliance collaboration,knowledge sharing on the organizational level becomes critical to collaborativeinnovation. If enterprises want the outcome of the collaboration innovation and makeprofits from it, they need to keep instant interaction and communication, and sharetheir own knowledge and skills with the partners on a high level. On the other hand,the core enterprise may have trouble in the wrong transparency question, exposing thekey knowledge and core skills to the alliance partners and being misappropriated orimitated by other cooperation organizations in the common knowledge innovationproject, which lead to the loss of enterprise knowledge and competitive advantage,then the competitive position in its industry will be influenced. Therefore, ifenterprises participate in the inter-organizational collaboration, the knowledge amongcooperative parties must be shared and used to promote innovation. Meanwhile, theyhave to pay more attention to protect their own knowledge and core competitiveness.Research on knowledge sharing and knowledge protection is significant, practicallyfor enterprises participated in inter-organization.So far, most literatures about collaboration innovations and knowledgemanagement among various collaborative organizations are about knowledge sharing or knowledge protection separately. When taking one of the organization knowledgebehaviors into account, previous studies ignored the other one. So most scholars failedto conduct studies, which is how to balance the both activities coexisting at the sametime in one enterprise. This thesis puts knowledge sharing and knowledge protectioninto one research framework to study, and discusses the relationship between them.Under the background of enterprise’s actual collaboration innovation projectdevelopment case, the dissertation tries to find out the characteristics of knowledgesharing and protection during enterprise cooperation. Then, according to the empiricalresearch conclusion of path between the influencing factors of knowledge sharing andknowledge protection to inter-organizational collaboration performance, thedissertation systematically puts forward to promote the enterprise strategy frameworkand several specific mechanism of knowledge sharing and protection. The mentionedabove are main innovation points of the study as well. At the same time, the thesistries to complement and enrich the related theory of enterprise collaborationinnovation and knowledge management.After clarifying the current situation of the research literature related tocollaboration innovation and knowledge management, the thesis combines with theknowledge related to synergy theory, game theory and co-opetition theory, the papertopic Research on Knowledge Sharing and Protection Mechanisms of Enterpriseswithin Inter-organizational Collaboration is determined. There are several mainresearch branches as follows.Firstly, the study analyzes knowledge sharing and protection behaviors andcharacteristics of enterprise belong to knowledge intensive manufacturing industrythrough the actual case studies, which participate in inter-organizational collaborationinnovation projects. After taking several on-site interviews and deep case analysis ontwo collaborative development projects of company H and company T, the thesissummarizes relationship structure and knowledge sharing and protection characters ofenterprises within inter-organizational collaboration activities in practice. In addition,by analyzing the case enterprises’ cooperation and knowledge exchange situation, itcould be confirmed preliminarily that enterprise’s knowledge protection behavior iscomplement and helpful for knowledge sharing behavior. Secondly, enterprise knowledge sharing and protection influence factorhypothesis are put forward through theoretical derivation, then verified anddetermined by the questionnaire survey and SPSS regression analysis methods. Thesispreliminarily determines five key factors of inter-organizational collaborationenterprise knowledge sharing and protection from knowledge-based view, relationshipcapital view and sense of risk. The factors are knowledge complementarity,knowledge complexity, trust, contracts and knowledge loss risk. And five groups ofpositive or negative influence of these factors on knowledge sharing and knowledgeprotection are assumed. Then the author conducts questionnaire survey and collectdata from knowledge intensive manufacturing enterprises. The verification results ofabove influence hypothesis obtained by regression analysis of survey data is asfollows. Knowledge complementarity has a significantly positive influence onknowledge sharing, and significantly negative effect on knowledge protection;knowledge complexity has a significant negative influence on knowledge sharing, buthas no significant influence on knowledge protection; Trust has a significant positiveinfluence on knowledge sharing, and significant negative effect on knowledgeprotection; Contract has a significant positive influence on both knowledge sharingand knowledge protection; Knowledge loss risk does not significantly affectknowledge sharing, but has a significantly negative effect on knowledge protection. Ina word, knowledge complementarity, knowledge complexity, trust and contract are thekey influence factors of knowledge sharing, and knowledge complementarity, trust,contracts and knowledge loss risk are the key influence factors of knowledgeprotection.Thirdly, on the basis of influencing factors determined on knowledge sharing andknowledge protection, the thesis proposes a more complete influence path theorymodel. AMOS structural equation model is used to analyze the acting path and effectof the influence factors on enterprise knowledge sharing and protection performanceto the inter-organizational collaboration performance, and get a further discussion onthe effect among trust, contract and knowledge loss risk, the relationship betweenknowledge sharing and knowledge protection, as well as the relationship betweenprivate performance and common performance. After model correction, the theoreticalmodel improved has a better fitting degree with survey data. And the analysis results of structural equation model are consistent with the influencing factor analysismentioned before again. At the same time, the results show that the positiverelationship between trust and knowledge loss risk is not supported by the data,butcontract has negative restrain effects on knowledge loss risk. There is no datasupporting the relationship between knowledge sharing and the individualperformance of core enterprises, while knowledge sharing has a very significantlypositive correlation with the overall performance of all collaborative parties. Therelationship between knowledge protection and private performance of core enterpriseshows positive, but there is no data supporting the positive influence of knowledgeprotection and common performance of all parties. What’s more, knowledge sharingand knowledge protection have a positive correlation relationship, and the commonperformance of all parties and the private performance of core enterprise also have apositive correlation relationship.Fourthly, the thesis formulates the strategy framework of knowledge sharing andprotection for enterprises’ inter-organizational collaboration, and puts forward a seriesof specific direct and effective knowledge sharing and protection mechanisms,according to the result of all above the theoretical analysis and empirical research, inorder to provide some theoretical decision-making reference for enterprises toparticipate in collaboration innovation and knowledge management practice. Threebasic strategies include open strategy, moderate strategies with different levels ordifferent stage, strict strategy. The study shows that a wide range of knowledgeprotection mechanisms can be relied on, including trust and contract synergygovernance mechanism, virtual cooperation department management mechanism,licensing management mechanism, knowledge loss risk warning mechanism,application of knowledge base management innovate method, realization ofbiculturalism of sharing and protection.In the end of the research, the thesis hopes to convey the followingenlightenment to the theory researchers and enterprise managers through the research.By relevant conclusions of influence factors and the function routes, we can have abetter comprehension about how to choose knowledge sharing and protection strategyfor dealing with the relationship with other organizations of inter-organizational collaboration innovation, and how to make use of relevant knowledge managementmechanism for specifying and promoting enterprises’ knowledge sharing andknowledge protection activities. Inter-organizational collaboration enterprisesengaging in knowledge protection keep their interests from damaging, which is notthe opposite of knowledge sharing. On the contrary, knowledge protection canpromote better knowledge sharing among all parties, and it is more conducive to theoverall performance improvement. While the core enterprise should keep their ownexclusive knowledge assets from losing and damaging, it is expected to pay attentionto promote collaboration common performance, because it is one of the ways toimprove private performance.