The Antecedents Of External Search Breadth And Its Impact On Product Innovation Performance:a Perspective Of Formal And Informal Search

In developed countries, the share of innovative ideas from external sources is estimated to account for an average of45%of total ideas in many industries. Most of Chinese SMEs generally have limited resources and technological competence, which could not support their innovative development by accumulating the knowledge and experience internally. As the SMEs are actively engaging in open innovation to utilize and exploit external knowledge and technologies, an important research question is how the firms search externally from the sources or actors such as customers, suppliers, competitors, universities and such on.Previous research hasn’t distinguished the impact of formal and informal search on the acquiring of the knowledge from a wide range of external actors and sources. And less attention is given to investigate the influence of knowledge attributes and slack resource on search strategy for external knowledge. Based on the perspective of formal and informal search, the dissertation explores the impact of external search breadth on product innovation performance and the antecedents of external search breadth by using a survey of243manufacturing SMEs in Zhejiang province. The dissertation is further divided into three studies which are introduced below respectively.Study1is conducted to examine the effect of formal-informal search breadth and their interaction with knowledge attributes on product innovation performance. The empirical results show that both formal and informal search breadth has significant positive effect on product innovation performance, and knowledge tacitness negatively moderates the relationship between informal search breadth and product innovation.Study2is conducted to analyze the impact of knowledge attributes (knowledge tacitness and technological complexity) on formal-first search breadth. The empirical results show that knowledge tacitness significantly increases the propensity of formal-first search breadth, but it finds technological complexity has no significant impact on formal-first search breadth. The results mean while the knowledge is tacit, the firm is more likely to search from external sources or actors formally.Study3is conducted to examine the impact of different types of slack resource on external search breadth. The empirical results indicate that unabsorbed slack has significant positive effect on both formal search breadth and informal search breadth, and absorbed slack has significant positive effect on informal search breadth.The dissertation contributes to the previous literature on innovation search in the following ways. Firstly, it introduces the perspective of formal and informal search to analyze the relationship between external search breadth and product innovation performance, and finds that both formal and informal search breadth have significantly positive effect on product innovation performance. Secondly, it extends to include knowledge attributes as a context to moderate the relationship between external search breadth and innovative performance, and finds that knowledge tacitness has negative moderating effect on the relationship between informal search breadth and product innovation performance. Thirdly, it examines the knowledge attributes as ancetedents of external search breadth, and finds that knowledge tacitness possitvely increase the propensity of formal-first search to acquire the knowledge from a wide range of sources or actors. Lastly, it also extends the external search literatures by focusing on firm’s slack resource as an important antecedent, and finds that different types of slack resource have diverse impact on external search breadth.