Knowledge / Researcher Diversity, Dual - Mode Network Structure And Emerging Technology Innovation Performance: Empirical Comparison Of Emerging Technology Enterprises In China And The United States

Emerging technology innovation (ETI) as an important strategic and new development issue for China’s industry upgrading and innovation strategy means special approaches of both Corner Overtaking and advantage of backwardness. According to the ecologic features of ETI including vague destination, irregular process and dispersedly distributed resources, the driving powers of ETI from internal organization remains in black box yet. There are several limits in the existed innovation research involving resources-based and network-based perspective:resource-based view ignores the diversities of innovation resources, while network-based view takes the innovation network as single mode, both of which cannot reveal the theoretical mechanism of ETI innovation.Developing and combining the two views of innovation, learn from the newly published literatures of ETI, the thesis focuses on the ecologic driving powers from the combined perspective of knowledge & researcher and knowledge & cooperation network. By constructing theoretical framework of ETI’s driving ecologic powers from internal organization, the theses studies following topics:(1) The ecologic driving powers consist of knowledge & researchers diversity and knowledge & cooperation network which are the ETI’s ecologic resources’base. Independent effects model is constructed according to this to reveal the ecologic power sources of ETI. (2) The interactive effects between knowledge and knowledge network, researchers and cooperation network in ETI constitutes ecologic powers mechanism and according interactive model is constructed also. (3) Further more, there are driving and interacting relationship between team powers mechanism and knowledge powers mechanism. The team power contributes ETI performance directly and by driving knowledge power indirectly. The researchers diversity and knowledge diversity interacts in ETI. So integrated model is constructed to reveal the driving system of ETI. The process of Firms seeking to innovate is just the three effects of the four driving power sources’integration cross level. Several hypothesis are come up with according to the theoretical development.Based on the sample with 7 emerging technologies and 251 companies from China and USA, patent data from SIPO (State Intellectual Patents Office of PRC) and USPTO (US Patent and Trademarks Office), the study tests the models with various methods:(1) Comparing studies quantitatively between China and USA samples on the ETI and its ecologic driving powers internal organization. Results shows:USA samples’ETI performance is significantly higher than China’s counterpart(both quantitatively and qualitatively). The USA samples enjoy more knowledge diversity, structural holes and centralities of cooperation network than China samples, while the researchers diversity equals approximately. (2) Independent model is tested by negative binominal distribution model method, which results show that knowledge diversities are U-shape related with ETI quantitatively and totally, but ambiguously with innovation quality. Researchers diversity is U-shape related with ETI qualitatively, qualitatively and totally. Both the structure holes of knowledge and cooperation network are negatively related with the three dimensions of ETI performance, except the relationship between the structure holes of cooperation network and the quality and total performance of ETI. (3) Interaction effects are tested by regression model which results show that: knowledge diversity and knowledge centrality, researchers diversity and cooperation centrality positively interact in ETI, while knowledge diversity and knowledge network structural hole negatively interact, the interaction effects between the researchers diversity and cooperation network structural hole remain unrevealed. (4) Integration model is tested by SEM model and the results show that researchers diversity and knowledge diversity interacts positively, and the researchers diversity drives knowledge diversity and knowledge network structural hole positively, except the knowledge network centrality. Cooperation network structure hole positively relates with knowledge diversity and knowledge network structure holes, while cooperation network negatively relates with knowledge diversity and positively with knowledge network centrality. Both the relationship between cooperation network centrality and knowledge network structure hole, cooperation network structure hole and knowledge network centrality remains ambiguous.Conclusions by the empirical study show that firms should make decision between huge-crow or elite strategy, exploration or exploitation strategy to improve ETI performance by promote the diversity of knowledge and researchers, and the two modes network’ structure as well by promoting the cooperation. By fitting the diversity of resources and network structure are key approaches to design knowledge and team mechanism. The fundamental way to improve ETI performance is to construct the team’s driving roles. Exploring the new research approaches of ETI based on the combination of resources and network views contributes to the ETI research on paradigm sense. The theory of ecologic driving power mechanism inter organization including the structure of diversity, the cross level effects model generates various new conclusions and contributes dramatic theory innovation. The results also mean a lot of practical approaches of the strategy and tactics for those firms seeking for ETI.