A Study On The Open Innovation Technology Strategy Of Enterprises In Uncertain Environments

Since the late 1980s to 1990s, the enterprise environment has changed largely. Firstly, entering the era of knowledge economy, innovation becomes the key factor for enterprise to obtain competitive advantage and to keep sustainable development. Secondly, the enterprise environment shows a high degree of uncertainty. For example, the needs is diverse and changeable, the technique changes rapidly and continuously, the product is multifarious to renew, the competition is becoming fierce, and the advantages pass in a twinkling, and so on. It makes technology innovation become a kind of complex activity. An important and difficult problem which enterprises being faced with is how to build a competitive advantage based on technologies to enhance the performance of technological innovation under the uncertainty of the environment. Based on this background, the basic research of this dissertation is to solve the problem of how to develop and implement appropriate technology innovation strategy to establish competitive advantage based on technology to promote technological innovation performance in uncertain environments.About this basic problem, the research of this dissertation can be broken down to three more concrete subproblems. The first is what influences the uncertainty of the environment brings to the enterprise technology innovation strategy. The second is whether open innovation strategy could become a source of technological innovation performance under uncertain environment. The third is how to develop and implement the open innovation strategy if open innovation strategy is an important source of enterprise technological innovation performance.Based on the reference of domestic and foreign literature, from an angle of open technology innovation strategy, this dissertation gives a detailed analysis and testing for the impect of environmental uncertainty on open innovation strategy and openness, as well as the impect of openness on technological innovation performance. Futhermore., the dissertation explores the construction of open technology innovation strategy of enterprise in our country, and finally answers the fundamental question raised by the study and its subproblems. Thus the dissertation builds a more complete analysis framework for open technology innovation strategy of Chinese enterprises.The full text is divided into seven chapters. Major contents of each chapter are outlined as follows:Chapter 1 is the introduction, which introduces the practical and theoretical backgrounds, the definition of the concept related to the research, the research methods and processes. Chapter 2 is the literature review, which provides a summary about the development of theory which includes enterprise environment and its uncertainty, enterprise technology innovation strategy and open innovation, enterprise technological innovation performance evaluation.Chapter 3 describes the theoretical basis of open technology innovation strategy. Starting from strategy to technology innovation strategy and open technology innovation strategy, based on the theory of strategy and technology innovation strategy and open innovation, this chapter has constructed the framework for open technology innovation strategy.Chapter 4, in the light of the basic problem and subproblems of this research, builds relevant conceptual model and presents related research hypothesis.Chapter 5 is empirical research, which primarily tests the study hypotheses proposed by the previous chapter. First of all, in terms of the designation on questionnaire, data collection and measurement of variables, this chapter introduces the empirical research methods of this dissertation. And then it makes reliability and validity test for the samples. Finally, using structural equation modeling, this chapter individually tests the research hypothesis.Chapter 6 discusses the ways for constructing open technology innovation strategy in our country. This chapter primarily answered the third subproblem:How to develop and implement the open innovation strategy by the enterprise if open innovation strategy is an important source of enterprise technological innovation performance.Chapter 7 sums up the research findings of this dissertation, and reports the implications of this study and the limitations of the present study, and finally points out the direction for further research.This dissertation has reached the following conclusions:1.In view of the system environment, the measurement dimension about environmental uncertainty constitutes by dynamics, hostile and non-equilibrium.Currently people's understandings for enterprise environments are usually based on a non-system environment view, without view the enterprise environments as an organic whole which integrated with inside and outside environments. This isolated "closed" approach tends to cut off some things with the contact of other things. This dissertation adopts the view of system environment provided by professor Zhao xibin (2007) which considered enterprise environment system consisted of the external environment and internal environment. And it added non-equilibrium into environmental uncertainty dimensions. Therefore, the environmental uncertainty eventually would de divided into three dimensions:dynamic, hostile and non-equilibrium. And the questionnaire about the environmental uncertainty would be designed in accordance with this way. The ultimate result of environmental uncertainty factor analysis shows that five factor are extracted form the measurement item of environmental uncertainty, namely the environmental dynamics, environmental hostile, external environment imbalance, internal environmental imbalance, and non-equilibrium between internal and external environment. Therefore, this dissertation will eventually extract the above five dimensions from environmental uncertainty.2. Environmental uncertainty promotes the enterprise to take open technology innovation strategy.The increase in environmental uncertainty leads the closed creative thinking--"self-reliance" will no longer be sustained in many industries. In 2003, Chesbrough first introduced the concept of open innovation, and noted that many enterprises, particularly in high-tech enterprises, have fundamentally changed the way of their innovation:from closed innovation into open innovation. In recent years, literature related to research on open innovation started to rise, but it is lack of empirical study about the relationship between environmental uncertainty and open technology innovation strategy, especially empirical study from China. Our empirical study on domestic enterprises shows that although the overall openness is not high, and the effects some dimensions of environmental uncertainty on open innovation strategy and openness is not significant, on the whole we can conclude from the empirical results that the environmental uncertainty has driven enterprises to increase openness and adopt open technology innovation strategy.3. Environmental uncertainty is, to a certain extent, a moderating variable of the relationship between openness and technological innovation performance.From the results of empirical study, the environmental dynamics plays a moderating effect in the relationship between openness and technological innovation performance. While imbalance of internal environment plays a retroegulation effect in the relationship between openness and technological innovation performance. Moderating effect other dimensions of environmental uncertainty on the relationship between openness and technological innovation performance are not significant. This shows that in higher dynamic environment, open technology innovation strategy is more advantageous to improve the technological innovation performance, while in lower dynamic environment, open technology innovation strategy is fewer advantageous to improve the technological innovation performance. The internal environmental imbalance and the internal management of enterprises are closely related, and the retroegulation effect of the internal environmental imbalance describes that the incomplete internal management of enterprise is disadvantageous to open technology innovation. Moderating effect of environmental hostile, external environment imbalance, and non-equilibrium between internal and external environment on the relationship between openness and technological innovation performance are not significant, it means that these dimensions of environmental uncertainty don't affect the relationship between openness and technological innovation performance, even in highly hostile and non-equilibrium environment, open technology innovation strategy does not seem more important; while in lowly hostile and non-equilibrium environment, open technology innovation strategy is not just useless. This also indicates that, no matter what the environmental hostile, external environment imbalance, and non-equilibrium between internal and external environment is like, open technology innovation strategy has always been the important source of the enterprise technological innovation performance.4. Openness is an important source of the enterprise technological innovation performance.After taking the firm size and age as control variables, from the results of empirical test about the effect of openness on technological innovation performance, it can conclude that the open breadth and open depth correlates positively with technological innovation performance significantly. The level of significance has reached 0.001. It shows that openness can explain technological innovation performance of enterprises. And so openness is an important source of the enterprise technological innovation performance.5. There are five possible ways for constructing the open technology innovation strategy in Chinese enterprise.Base on the theoretical and empirical analysis, this dissertation concludes that it can construct the open technology innovation strategy in Chinese enterprise from five dimensions of open technology innovation strategy, i.e. establishing the leading technology strategic ideology, implementing positive strategy for new product development, widely using external innovation resources, increasing the level of investment in research and development, and changing the method of protecting intellectual property rights.