The Empricial Study Of The Influence Of R&D Openness And Organizational Learning On Firms’ Innovation Performance

Innovation has become an essential way firms use to earn competitive advantages in the era of knowledge-based economy. How to effectively conduct innovative activities and improve the innovation performance is an important question that attracts conerns from both academics and practitioners. Comparing with firms in western countries, the level of technological innovation of firms in China is laggard. From the perspective of the long term development of national economic system, the nation’s innovation capability could be improved and the nation could earn competitive advantages in the globalizaiton trend only if firms enhance their innovation capacity and outcomes of knowledge activities.Considering the question that which type of innovation mode is conducive for firms to fit themselves with the features of knowledge-based economy, western scholars pointed out that open innovation mode is helpful for firms to acquire heterogeneous knowledge from external sources. Nevertheless, the relationship between the degree of R&D openness and a firm’s innovation performance is unclear, and it is doubtful that Chinese firms can directly use the research conclustions derived from studies conducted in western countries. Meanwhile, constant organizational learning has become a critical method for firms to cultivate core competence. The roles of organizational exploitation learning and organizational exploration learning are particularly worthwhile to discuss in depth. In addition, knowledge is the foundation for any innovative activities and the most essential heterogeneous resource for firms, the effective manage of various knowledge of a firm has become a key that determines whether innovative activities are successful. Considering that innovative pratices of Chinese firms are happened tightly around R&D openness, organizational learning and knowledge management while prior studie pay little attention on the integrated research with these three themes, which is the motivation and startin point of the present study.This study defines R&D openness, organizational learning, konwledge management capacity and innovation performance at the very beginning of the thesis, and then reviws related literature on resource dependent theory, open innovation theory, and organizational learning theory. Furthermore, this research explores the main factors impacting on firms’ innovation performance from the perspective of R&D process, and then develops research hypotheses and corresponding conceptual model. Based on the review of prior studies, the present study compiled the questionnaire and revised the questionnaire in line with the results of preliminary test. Through large-scale visit companies and distibuted questionnaire, an effective sample of 312 firms is eventually received. After checking the reliability and validity of the effective sample, the present study uses structural equation model and multipel regression to testify the hypotheses. The main findings of this study indicate that(1) There are significant differences of R&D openness, exploitation learning, knowledge acquisition capability, managerial innovation performance and technical innovation performance among firms with varied sizes; there are significant differences of R&D openness, exploitation learning, exploration learning, knowledge share capability, knowledge application capability and technical innovation performance among firms with varied level of R&D intensity; there are significant differences of R&D openness and knowledge application capability between domestic firms and foreign invested firms; there are significant differences of R&D openness, knowledge acquisition capability and managerial innovation performance between group firms and non-group firms; there are signficant differences of R&D openness and knowledge acquisition capability between manufacturing firms and other firms.(2) The level of firms’ managerial innovation performance and technical innovation performance will improve with the increase of the degree of R&D openness, which means R&D openness has positive effect on firms’ innovation performance. Particularly, the increase of the degree of R&D openness exerts bigger effect on technical innovation performance than on managerial innovation performance, i.e., the positive effect of R&D openness on technical innovation performance is nearly two times higher than that on managerial innovation performance. Furthermore, knowledge acquisition capacity and knowledge share capacity play the positive moderating roles in the relationships between R&D openess and managerial and technical innovation performance.(3) Both exploitation learning and exploration learning exert positive effect on firms’ managerial and technical innovation performance. Comparing with exploitation learning, exploration learning plays a more imporatant role in affecting both firms’ managerial and technical innovation performance. Comparing with managerial innovation performance, exploitation learning and exploration learning exert stronger effect on technical innovation performance.(4) Comparing with exploitation learning, exploration learning plays as the mediating role within the relationship between R&D openness and firms innovation performance. Furthermore, exploration learning mediates the moderating effect of knowledge share capability on the relationship between R&D openness and innovation performance. This finding has essential theoretical value for the understanding of the close association between knowledge management capacity and organizational learning.At the end of this research, based on the analysis of the emprical findings, this study puts forwad managerial solutions and policy suggestions for managers in firms and policy makers in governments to improve innovation performance.