Relational Governance Of Intermediaries In Service Innovation Network

The service innovation strategies are now transferring from firm-centric to network centric innovation. The innovation networks have become the critical engine and fundamental organizations for service innovation. Nowadays, during the process of service innovation, companies are facing more and more complicated network scenarios. It is quite difficult to observe the behavior of network members in service innovation network. The innovation tasks can not be defined precisely before ahead. The collaborative innovation outcome can not be easily evaluated. The profiting from service innovation network are hard to distributed. It is less effective to control opportunistic behaviors of network members in service innovation network by exclusively formal contract or dyadic trust. The governance of service innovation network is lack for efficient mechanisms. The coordination and co-innovation in service innovation network don’t have aligned incentive institutions. The research of intermediaries in innovation provides a new theoretical perspective for the question of governance of service innovation network. Recent literatures pointed out that intermediaries can go beyond the limits of dyadic relationships. As the common third party of multi-relationships, intermediaries are able to govern multiple co-innovation relationships and promote service innovation. However, the studies of the relational governance by intermediaries are still in the early stage. The construct and dimensions of intermediaries relational governance are not clearly defined and its impact on innovation network performance and its underlying theoretical mechanisms are still waiting for exploration.Based on above facts, the research question of this study is how firms build high performance innovation network by intermediaries relational governance. The study is aimed to build the theory of service innovation network governance. Firstly, the literature of intermediaries relational governance and its impact on the service innovation network performance are reviewed. Secondly, using multiple case study, this study collects data of six co-innovation projects in Zhejiang digital home industry. Based on qualitative analysis, this study generalizes a conceptual model of intermediaries relational governance, organizational engagement and network performance as well as a series of propositions. Thirdly, based on relational view and TCE, this study constructs a model of intermediaries relational governance and innovation network performance and proposes a series of hypotheses. Fourthly, this study conducts a survey on firms’collaborative service innovation projects and obtains 221 complete effective responses. By using SEM(structural equation model), this study tests the main effect of intermediaries relational governance on service innovation network performance and the mediating effect of organizational engagement. Fifth, this study tests the moderating effects of contract-based governance and behavioral uncertainty by regression model.This study obtains these five conclusions. (1) Intermediaries relational governance is a kind of governance mechanism enacted by intermediaries using three mechanisms including co-reputation, procedural routines and technical norms to promote organizational engagement of network members and improve the collaborative innovation performance. (2) Intermediaries relational governance has positive effect on service innovation network performance (both for innovation performance and operation performance), in which technical norms has the most largest effect. (3) Organizational engagement mediates the relationship between intermediaries relational governance and network performance. (4) Contract-based governance has positive moderating effects on the relationship between intermediaries relational governance and network innovation performance. (5) Behavioral uncertainty has positive moderating effects on the relationship between intermediaries relational governance and network innovation performance. In the contrast, behavioral uncertainty has negative moderating effects on the relationship between co-reputation and network operation performance as well as for the technical norms. However, its moderating effect on the relationship between procedural routines and network operation performance is not supported by the survey data.This study makes contributions to the literatures in the following five aspects. (1) It extends the relational view from the perspective of intermediaries and build a theory of service innovation network governance based on intermediaries relational governance. (2) It contributes the research of the limitation of relational governance by focusing on the contingent factors of service innovation network. (3) It extends the research of innovation intermediaries by separating social process and governance function from its structural attributes. (4) It makes an efforts to bridge the relational governance theory and organizational behavior theory in the frame of a theoretical model. (5) It contributes the discussion of boundary management in the organization theory. In the future, the study should make more detailed analysis on different third party strategies. The measure of innovation network performance should be improved.