Acquisition Of External New Technology-Mode, Situation And Performance

The global competency of a country is highly dependent on its enterprises. With the rapid development of science and technology and hurried steps towards knowledge economy, however, China is facing a great challenge: many enterprises are losing their traditional cost or price-based advantages. It is essential to change the old competing paradigm by building a strong technological capability across the whole process of new product R&D, manufacture, and marketing. For those firms lack of internal R&D ability, it is probably a wise choice to acquire emerging or new technology from external innovative network.This study focuses on the processes and activities of external new technology acquisition at enterprise level, and constructs a conceptual framework to analyze the intrinsic links of acquisition pattern, technological capability the enterprise owned and the performance of the acquisition.In this paper, a two-step knowledge transfer model was built to describe the context of every individual project. Based on literature reviews and a pre-study, several qualitative and quantitative measures were developed as investigating instruments. After comparison and filter of some candidate indicators for technology transfer, a revised indicator-system which puts higher weights on innovative items but also seeks the balance of short and long-term performance were established to assess project achievements.The study found strong evidence that the external/internal knowledge transfer situation has significant influence on the performance of the acquisition of external technology. Especially, there exists a strong positive correlation between the performance and the degree of social relationship. Whereas the type of employee games in an enterprise can also affect the effectiveness and efficiency of knowledge share. Using canonical analysis, the study also demonstrated that there existed relationship between acquisition pattern choice/performance and Characteristics of technology/technology capability.The study led us to a conclusion that the processes rather than the conditions determine the results of the acquisition of external technology, and if managers paid more attention on the process and formed climates of cooperation and innovation within their enterprises, the performance would be raised.