Study On The Mechanism Between Innovation Openness And Open Innovation Performance

Since its emergence, as a creative technology innovation paradigm, open innovation received widespread concerns from enterprises. Many enterprises actively involved in the practice of open innovation, covered from large to middle and small size, hi-tech to traditional ones. Number of theoretical studies and empirical analyses come to a conclusion-open innovation involvement is positive for innovation performance, there exist reverse U-shape relationship between openness and innovation performance. But the discovered relationships between openness and innovation performance seem to be somewhat narrow. The first evidence is the measurement of innovation performance focus only on financial level, such as return on sales, quantity of patents, new product development and so on, which are not enough to embody the comprehensive gains an enterprises can get from open innovation. The second evidence is extant researches do not consider the differentiated contributions on innovation performance coming from different objects in the process of open innovation, so as to restricted the guidance value of final conclusions for enterprises on how to concentrate limited resources to selectively cooperate with different objects to realize maximization of innovation performance. The third one is that current studies mainly use linear analysis tools, therefore the conclusion can only prove a direct relationship between openness and innovation performance, it is still unclear whether there exist other factors which may also have impacts on the proved relationships, or except for this kind of direct impacting path, multi-impacting path may also exist between these two factors.Based on proved direct relationship between openness and innovation performance, the dissertation chooses to anatomy the associating mechanism between openness and open innovation performance from the perspective of impact of two vast-tested important factors in open innovation-business and technology scouting. The main research task of this dissertation includes the following three points:(1) to extend single financial view of innovation performance to open innovation performance which includes financial and non-financial performance index simultaneously;(2) to categorize openness, and introduce mediating factor of business model and moderating factor of technology scouting into the logic relation between openness and innovation performance, positioning the above two variables according to their change trend under open innovation situation, refining the measuring index of variables, constructing integrated structural model of categorized openness and open innovation performance, and raised relevant hypotheses;(3) to gather large surveying samples to empirically verify the structural model and relevant modifications, and test the validation of hypotheses.For the completion of research task, the dissertation first constructed an integrated theoretical model of openness and open innovation performance which includes the impacts of business model and technology scouting on the basis of systematic literature combing. This can provide a preliminary logic evidence for the rationality of mediating and moderating effect between the relations between openness and open innovation performance. After that, following the principles of formal case study, the dissertation chooses five typical open innovating enterprises to carry out a deep qualitative analysis. Through cross verification between case data and literal analysis, the measuring index of five key variables, that is openness, exploration and exploitation, open innovation performance, business model and technology scouting, the measuring items of these five variables were deducted for the guidance of question setting in surveying questionnaire. The third step is the collection of large sample survey data. Then select some of them randomly to conduct quantitative filter of the measuring index of key variables. Combining with the above integrative theoretic model, the affecting mechanism of openness on open innovation performance will be discussed, as well as the construction of integrative structural model for empirical analysis, and the putting forward of research hypotheses. The fourth one is to verify and modify the structural model with the rest of surveying data by means of SPSS statistics analysis and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), testing the degree of matching between hypotheses and open innovation practice of Chinese enterprises. The last step is the conclusion of analytic process and the result of the dissertation, including the theoretic significance of the paper and its reference value for enterprises" open innovation practicing, and discuss the direction of further studies in the future according to the defects of dissertation.After the completion of above steps, the dissertation comes to five important conclusions:(1) Except for financial rewards, enterprises can get strategic returns which are more abundant in content, deepen in influence and permanence compared with financial gains, and the strategic performance has positive contribution to financial performance;(2) Two categories of innovation orientation-exploration and exploitation have positive mediating effect on the relations between openness and open innovation performance, and there exists positive interactions between exploration and exploitation;(3) The opening of business model has complete mediating effect on the relation between exploration and financial performance of open innovation, while it shows only partial mediating effect on exploitation and financial performance of open innovation. But there is no significant affecting path between business model opening and strategic open innovation performance;(4) Enterprises" capability of technology scouting produces significantly positive moderating effect on the relations between the openness of explorative innovation and exploration, but its moderating role between the openness of exploitative innovation and exploitation is not significant;(5) Though the openness of exploration or exploitation has similar total effects on open innovation performance, they show quite different impacting mechanisms in de-composing and combination of total effects. The performance contribution of exploration presents more complicated and longer action paths.The dissertation breaks the limitation of multi-method verification for directly affecting relationship between openness and open innovation performance in extant studies. With the adoption of combination of normative theoretic analysis, case investigation and statistics analysis, the dissertation achieves the following three research progresses:(1) Putting forward, constructing and empirically verifying the measurement index of open innovation performance including financial performance and strategic performance simultaneously, enriching and deepening the understanding of multi-dimensional structure of open innovation performance;(2) Through the adoption of business model which functioning as the "cognitive map" between technological innovation and realization of economic value of technology, and another important factor in helping enterprises to cope with technological competition-technology scouting, the dissertation further the cognition for the functioning role of business model and technology scouting in innovation opening and innovation performance. These progresses provide a foundation for more extensive mechanism analysis between openness and open innovation performance in the future;(3) Testifying the conclusion that both exploration and exploitation have positive contributions on open innovation performance, while their affecting paths can be termed as direct and indirect. This conclusion can, to some extent, help to conciliate the decision dilemma in ambidexterity or sequential combination of two innovation orientations, and so as to provide a more scientific and reasonable theoretic reference in enterprises’pursuance of strategically ambidextrous equilibrium.