Mechanism Of The Adoption And Enduring Implementation Of Management Innovation In SMEs

SMEs’ innovation development issues have increasingly become the focus of both academic and business circles. With the restrictions of their limited resource, such as capitals and talents, and the potential risks from R&D activities, there is a sea of troubles for SMEs to carry out technical innovation activities. For this reason, integrating the internal and external knowledge and resources creatively through management innovation, the adoption(or invention) and implementation of a management practice, process, structure, or technique that is new to the firm in the growth initial period, realizing a rapid growth, has become an important option for many SMEs to realize their innovation development. However, compared to technical innovation, management innovation is a field that has not been fully studied, leading to the fact that it’s lack of sufficient theoretical foundation for us to analyze some management innovation issues. Such as when does the management innovation happens? How does the management innovation be implemented? And how does the management innovation affects the performance?Following the analytic logic of “drivers-behaviors-outcome”, focusing on the basic issue of “the mechanism of the adoption and enduring implementation of management innovation”, and combining the research methods of review and normative analysis, we finished our research as follows: first, we built up a “two stages model of management innovation”; second, we proposed three initial propositions; third, we built up a conceptual framework based on these three initial propositions. Furthermore, by using the multiple regression models and structural equation models with the data from 482 SMEs, we carried out three sub-studies to empirically examine the conceptual framework.The results show that:(1) the process of management innovation can be generalized into two stages: adoption and enduring implementation. In the adoption stage, the innovation solution is formed and recognized coherently by the decision-makers. In the enduring implementation stage, the innovation solution is implemented, internalized into daily behaviors and become a new tradition. Adoption is not equal to enduring implementation.(2) Basing on the attributions of the knowledge contents provided by different knowledge sources, we could divide the external knowledge sources into 3 types: supply chain knowledge source, competitor knowledge source, and institutional knowledge source. For SMEs, heterogeneous knowledge sources are very important external promoters for their management innovation adoption and different knowledge source have different influences. The promotion knowledge sources influence on SEMs’ management innovation adoption is significant from the supply-chain knowledge source, median from the institutional knowledge source, and insignificant from the competitor knowledge source. The moderating effect of environmental turbulence, as a situational variable, is not very significant in these processes.(3) The cognition appraisals to the innovation solutions from the employees could be represented by two aspects: perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. Compared to the management innovation solutions that is perceived usefulness, the management innovation solutions that is perceived easy of use tend to be enduring implemented more likely.(4) Management innovation activities, whose main contents are the revolution of structure, institution, process, management technique and so on, would break down the initial tradition in its implementation process. As a result, organizational inertia may become an obstacle to the implementation of management innovation to some extent. Precisely, action inertia and psychological inertia is the main obstacle in the enduring implementation process of management innovation, while the influence of insight inertia is not so significant.(5) Management innovation can bring the change to the organization only if it could be implemented into employees’ action. Observing the performance of the management innovation from the enduring implementation aspect, and introducing the concept of knowledge integration into the mechanism model, we could improve the rationality and explanatory power of this model.