Research On The Innovation Mechanism And Innovation Performance Of Industry Clusters Based On Network Structure

Since 1990s, there has been a widespread resurgence of interest in the issue of industry clusters, which followed Michael Porter's excellent work. Regional economists, geographers and planners have devoted a considerable part of their time and energy into this field. Industry clusters dominate today's world economic map and the phenomenon of industry clustering has been a typical feature of world economy. Clusters have been the critical mass for competition in almost all the areas and the competition between regions has been represented by their own clusters. Economic clusters, which are driven by industry clusters, have been an important source and engine of Chinese economic development. In the newly approved 11th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development (2006-2010), our government has raised improving innovation capability and developing industry clusters to a much higher level than ever.Innovation is the cluster's life line, and research on this issue is a very interest and important topic, so the author chose this subject and decided to do some research on the cluster innovation mechanism and innovation performance.There has emerged many strands of literature concerning industry clusters and the different scholar carries on his research from different perspective, which makes newcomers dazzle. Diversified research perspective and interacting, overlaping and complex research frameworks and approaches add difficulties to recognizing, understanding and developing clusters for people. The author thinks it's the very time to develop a more systematic platform or a more systematic perspective to integrate the diversified theories. Motivated by this, the author choose the network structure which is the primary feature of clusters to be his research perspective, and based on former scholars' work he put forward an improved SCP paradigm, which means Network Structure-Actor Conduct-Innovation Performance.In general, this dissertation mainly contributes to the following five questions:1) What is the network structure and what are the elements of clusters' network?2) How does the network structure of an industry cluster affect the cluster's innovative activities? And what are positive? What are passive?3) Which kind of roles do the cluster actors play in the innovative process9 What are their conduct features? And how do they interact with each other?4) At the enterprise level, what is the relationship between an enterprise's network structure in the cluster and its innovative performance?5) How do different network topologies and actors' interaction mechanism affect the cluster's innovative performance?This dissertation includes nine chapters and it can be divided into three parts according to the improved SCP paradigm except chapter 1 and chapter 9: i) the first part includes chapter 2 and chapter 3, which explains the concepts of network structure in cluster innovation field based on literature review; ii) the second part includes chapter 4 and chapter 5, which discusses roles and interacting mechanisms of the five kinds of actors, which are enterprises, academia, government, financial actors and institutions for collaboration; iii) the third part includes chapter 6, chapter 7 and chapter 8, which detects network structure's impact on the clusters' innovation performance through questionnaire and simulation, and in this part, the author also puts forward a comprehensive index system for evaluating the cluster's innovation capability.According to this framework, the followings are the contents of each chapter. In Chapter 1, the author explains the dissertation's background and perspective first, and then he elaborates on three fundamental concepts. The author also puts forward his research framework. That is the improved SCP paradigm, which means the analysis path of Network Structure-Actor Conduct-Innovation PerformanceIn Chapter 2 the author reviews the literature on network relationship first and then reviews empirical researches on clusters' network structure and then reviews models, instruments, software which have been used in the cluster innovation field.Chapter 3 explains how industry clusters' network structure affects the clusters' innovation performance positively and passively.Chapter 4 focuses the enterprises' roles and interacting mechanism on the two dimensions of innovation competition and cooperative innovation. The author uses an evolutionary game model when studying innovation competition. And a game model of agents' resource input under their innovation budget is constructs in the cooperative innovation partnership.Chapter 5 discusses the other four kinds of actors' roles and the interacting mechanisms among them.Chapter 6 detects the relationship between an enterprise's ego-network and its innovation performance by questionnaire. And the questionnaire data is from Hefei National New & High Technology Industrial Development Zone.Chapter 7 constructs a model of knowledge innovation and diffusion in clusters on the small-world network based on social exchange theory and analyzes the network topo- logy's impact on the cluster's innovation performance according to simulation results.Chapter 8 gives out a comprehensive index system for evaluating the cluster's innovation capability according to the improved SCP paradigm.Chapter 9 reviews the dissertation and points out some directions for future research.