Rcscarch On Supplier Involvement In New Product Development Based On Knowledge Intergration

Supplier Involvement in New Product Development, generally recognized as aCollaborative style of product development emphasizing the use of supplier, providesvarious platforms for manufactures to integrate all kinds of resources of supplier,shorten the circle of new product development, reduce the development cost, improvethe competitiveness of new product as well as to increase the performance of newproduct development. While at the same time, knowledge integration has turned out tobe a crucial approach not only to push firm’s technology innovation forward,but alsoimprove the performance of new product development in the knowledge economy era.Therefore, it’s of vital theoretical and practical importance to study the SINPD fromthe angle of knowledge integration.According to existing literature about customer and supplier involvement in newproduct development, customer involvement has acquired more attentions comparedwith supplier involvement. The most concentrated items about supplier involvement innew product development comes out to the facilitation effects about supplierinvolvement to firm’s technology innovation capability and new product developmentperformance, the influencing factors, cooperation mechanism and interest allocationmechanism about new product development. These researches still remains in arelatively separated and scattered condition. In order to build a relative completeanalysis framework and system, theoretical and empirical research on the influencefactors and influence mechanism about the process of SINPD systematically from theangle of knowledge integration is devised in this paper,In the theoretical part, this article firstly oulines the influence on the new productdevelopment performance which manufacture enterprises have by integrating thesuppliers motivation，cooperation relationship and participation strategy, as well ascapabilities of supplier into the new product development. Secondly, a mechanismtheory framework of supplier knowledge integration for the manufacture of newproduct development has come up in which both supplier knowledge integrationmechanism invovling suppliers knowledge integration process and the distribution ofbenefits and risk control in new product development will be analyzed. Thirdly, from atheoretical point, we introduce the affects of supplier knowledge integration on thenew product development performance.Then we define the connotation of supplierknowledge integration and analyze its impact on the performance of new product development from supplier knowledge integration mechanisms and knowledgeabsorption capacity. Finally, we put forward the hypothesis based on the conceptualmodel of the relationship between supplier involvement in new product developmentand supplier knowledge integration along with new product development performance.In the empirical part of this paper, a measurement index system and scaleconcerning the supplier capability, the cooperative relationship between supplier andmanufacture, supplier involvement strategy, the mechanism of supplier knowledgeintegration, knowledge absorptive capacity and new product developmentperformancewas originally built, Secondly, the small sample data from a samplingsurvey conducted for the MBA students in the Hunan University was used for thereliability and validity analysis about the scale. Then the exploring factor analysis wasused to revise the scales. Thirdly, the large sample data from a large sample surveyusing the purified scales was brought to made a reliability and validity analysis aboutthe scales. Then the confirmatory factor analysis was uesd to examine the constructionof the scales. At last, the entire hypothesis in this paper were examined by using SPSSand AMOS.Given the results of the empirical research, several important conclusions aredrawn. First, in the process of SINPD, in addition to the cooperative relationshipbetween supplier and manufacture, the supplier capability, the supplier involvementstrategy and the mechanism of supplier knowledge integration make significantpositive effect on new product development performance. Second, the supplierknowledge integration has an intermediary effect on the influences of cooperativerelationship between supplier and manufacture and the supplier involvement strategyto the new product development performance. Third, the complexity of knowledge andthe expressible of knowledge have positive moderating effect on the influence ofsupplier capability to new product development performance. The expressible ofknowledge have positive moderating effect on the influence of cooperative relationshipto the new product development performance. On the contrary, the complexity ofknowledge make a inconspicuous positive moderating effect on the influence ofcooperative relationship to the new product development performance. While thecomplexity of knowledge and the expressible of knowledge have positive moderatingeffect on the influence of involvement strategy to new product developmentperformance. Moreover, referring to the results of the theoretical and empirical study,some management policies and suggestions to improve the SINPD performance havebeen introduced in consideration of the enterprise practical situation. SINPD has become a vital organization type of cooperative innovation, which hasa very important influence to improve technological innovation performance ofmanufactures, and also to increase competitiveness of the whole supply chain. Thispaper simply made a basic study about the influence factors and the influencemechanism of the new product development performance in the SINPD from theknowledge integration angle. In order to provide a better theory reference and practicalguidance for SINPD, further study to consummate the research theoretical system frommore aspects is still needed.