The Study On High-Tech Firms' Learning Beyond Boundaries

In the era of knowledge economy, high-tech firms with the nature of knowledge-intensity play an active role in knowledge creation, technological development and fortune creation. With the development of globalization, more and more high-tech firms go beyond organizational and geographical boundaries to take advantage of existing capabilities and explore new knowledge. The boundaries of a firm have become blurred, since the organization can only operate effectively by allowing information, resources, creativity to pensentrate the organizational membrance quickly and easily.This dissertation examines high-tech firm's learning beyond the boundary from a strategic perspective. Learning activitis beyond the boundary examined in the paper lies in two aspects: learning across organizational boundary and across knowledge boundary. The former refers to the process that a firm acquires, shares and creates knowledge through the linkages with various outside organizations. The latter emphasizes how a firm achieves dynamic evolution of knowledge boundary in the learning process of accumulating technological and market knowledge. In other words, does a firm achieve incremental evolution through exploitation or fulfil radical evolution through exploration? On the foundation of a variety of theories such as resource-based view, knowledge-based view, and organizational learning theory, the dissertation analyzes the logic underlying a firm's learning beyond boundaries and conducts empirical studies and case study to further explore and examine multiple factors which might affect a high-tech firm's learning beyond boundaries.Firstly, the dissertation maintains that there is a spontaneous tendency for a firm to take a learning mode across boundaries. In the one hand, path dependence and local search make a firm prefer exploitation to exploration, and the gap between actual organizational performance and expected performance also acts as a factor stimulating a firm to choose a learning mode. On the other hand, some firms might emphasize internal learning ignoring outside learning, or vise verse, because of the limits of internal capabilities or the barriers of acquiring external knowledge.The dissertation further conducts empirical study to confirm the impacts of a firm's multiple internal factors on its learning beyond boundaries. It examine the attributes of technological asset (tacitness and systematic embeddedness), the attributes of relational asset (reputation, effects of customer relation, and experience of technological cooperation), and the attributes of structural asset(harmony and automony). With a sample of 117 high-tech firms, it finds that exploitation is significantly related to tacitness, effects of customer relation and harmony while exploration is significantly related to reputation, harmony and autonomy. It also finds that reputation significantly affects organizational performance, that exploitation is significantly related to organizational overall performance and new product performance and that exploration is significantly related to organizational overall performance. As for the attributes of strategic assets and learning beyond organizational boundary, it finds that the features of relational asset influence managers' perception of strategic importance of external learning.Exploitation and exploration as two modes of learning beyond knowledge boundary have a paradoxical relationship with so many differences in logics, resource allocation, organizational structure, and so on. The paper suggests high-tech firms to form three mechanisms to balance exploition and exploration: The first mechanism is to accept a paradoxical logic by all the employees and to adopt multiple learning ways comprehensively so as to help employees to balance exploitation and exploration. The second mechanism is to form ambidextrous organization or hypertext organization. The third mechanism is to select learning mode dynamicly based on external environment. Under different external environments, a firm can take either exploitation or exploration with priority. If a firm has multple projects, it should decide which projects conduct more exploration and which projects carry out more exploitation based on a project's external environment and profitability.As for the learning beyond the organizational boundary, the paper does some theoretical arguments in knowledge sharing and knowledge creation. Using game theory, it argues that a firm will take a strategy of sharing knowledge with the expectation that the potential partner will share knowledge and that the value of absorbing new knowledge created by partners is greater than the loss of sharing knowledge. Linking the differences between strategic assets of partners with the possibility of knowledge sharing, the paper maintains that more similiarity between partners' technological assets, less uncertainty between partners' relational assets, and more harmony between partners' structural assets usually will lead to higher possibility of knowledge sharing. In addition, the paper shows the characteristics of several governance structures in knowledge sharing. In terms of knowledge creation beyond organizational boundary, it emphasizes how an organization can learn across both organizational and knowledge boundary and compares the differences between exploitational alliance and explorationary alliance.Based on a sample of multinational corporations' R&D activities conducted in China in electronic and telecommunication industries during the period from 1995 to 2007, the dissertation examines the factors influencing high-tech firms' learning beyond the organizational boundary under the background of open economy. The empirical study finds that internal R&D is significantly related to cultural distance, location, and research orientation. In addition, among 20 leading multinational corporations in the two industries, a majority of them has taken a flexible learning strategy which involves both internal R&D and R&D alliance and conducts both basic and application research activities and development activities.The final part of the dissertation is a case study on two high-tech firms' learning beyond boundaries. It finds that the large corporation achieves long-term survival by continuously developing technology and balancing exploration and exploitation while the small enterprise quickly grows by exploiting specialized technology and evolving businesses gradually. The innovation-orientated company focuses more on learning beyond knowledge boundary, while the custom-oriented company emphasizes more on learning beyond organizational boundary. There exists complementary relationship between learning activities beyond knowledge and organizational boundaries.