The Integrated Innovation Patterns And Selection Of Equipment Product

Integrated innovation has become an important way for the equipment industry to achieve independent innovation, speed up the technological catch-up process, and the integrated innovation patterns are also becoming diversified. However, as equipment products have the typical characteristics of complex products and systems on technology composition and product architecture, which make equipment industry enterprises face the problem of patterns selection in order to carry out integrated innovation effectively. Therefore, by taking equipment product as the research object, the paper aims to explore the integrated innovation patterns problem of indigenous equipment product, and provide theoretical guidance and management support for enterprises to promote the growth of technological capability through the reasonable selection of integrated innovation patterns.This paper adopts a combined method of theoretical research, case study and statistical analysis. First, this dissertation will make a comprehensive in-depth study on definition and meaning of integrated innovation basing on literature review and expert interview, and design the initial questionnaire for integrated innovation of equipment product. Subsequently, based on the pre-survey with technical director of product development, the original measure scale is revised and the formal questionnaire is established.129 questionnaires of equipment product innovation projects are gathered through personnel interviews. Finally, case study reports and data analysis are conducted. Three stages of the research work are as following.First of all, the four different archetypes of integrated innovation:architecture design, modular replacement, internal integration, and license improvement are identified based on theoretical analysis and field research, and then a comparative analysis is conducted. The case study shows that the integrated innovation process of equipment product consists of the following stages, including investigation of market and user demand, prototype identification and reference, product functional analysis and design, modular decomposition and outsourcing, systems integration and testing, system delivery and service provision etc. Meanwhile, the architecture design emphasizes the reconfiguration of design rules on product system; module replacement more focuses on the change of core design concept in one certain modular; internal integration pay attention to product design, module development and system integration and other key tasks independently; license improvement focuses on improving the design, technology or unique component of licensed products incrementally through interactive learning of internal research and development personnel. Secondly, the formative model of integrated innovation patterns on equipment product is constructed based on theoretical research and case study, and then an empirical analysis is conducted. It indicates that the influencing factors have a positive effect on integrated innovation performance of equipment product, including market knowledge capability, degree of modularity, technology absorption and internal integration. The influencing factors affect the integrated innovation performance of equipment product indirectly through mediator variable like internal integration, including market knowledge capability, degree of modularity, technology absorption. The internal integration has a significant positive effect on integrated innovation performance. The results also show that we should pay much attention to some key factors in the process of equipment product development, including the knowledge accumulation and learning of architecture and component, degree of modularity, capacity of experiment, etc.Thirdly, the patterns selection is studied on the basis of data analysis and key factors mentioned above, and three different transfer paths are proposed. It shows that internal research and development is the main sources of technology in the process of equipment product development, and the external technology sources of users, technical standards, suppliers and contract technology are an important complementary to the internal research. Through analysis of the sample data, the local equipment enterprises select the module replacement as the main pattern of equipment product development, and license improvement is the lowest. The effective selection of integrated innovation patterns can be achieved through three typical pathways.