Agglomeration Knowledge And Innovation:Theory, Mechanism And Evidence

In today's knowledge-based economy, firms have to continually make changes to cope with competition, and then they can maintain the competitive advantage in the market. Therefore, innovation is essential for the survival and development of firms. With the development of information technology and globalization, we are surrounded by the information. However, we are so difficult to distinguish truly effective information from too much information. Clustering, or geographical agglomeration of firms in an industry sector can mitigate uncertainty and risk because of information asymmetry, which can help firms find the right direction for firm innovation.Based on the social division of labor and increased innovation risk, clusters have become one of the important forms of organization in the worldwide. The most attractive thing of innovation for cluster is that the cluster members are in the close location and operate in the same industry, therefore they will have many great discussions according to their understandings to the industry, finally produce creative idea. Meanwhile, when the creative ideas appear in the cluster, the upstream and downstream enterprises can polish these ideas and improve them, and then implement them. These ideas become technological innovation from fantasy, and eventually commercialization. In recognition of the benefits of cluster, most firms urges to know how to promote exchanges and cooperation among firms in the cluster. In these factors being proposed, knowledge acquisition, flow, transformation and absorption undoubtedly are among the most proximal and critical factors to influence cluster innovation, which can advance knowledge exchange and innovation capability.Knowledge-based view is one of important research directions in the cluster innovation field recently. In knowledge-based view, cluster is viewed as a place of knowledge creation and cluster maintain the competitive advantage through enhancing the capability of knowledge creation of a single firm. The base of knowledge-based view is knowledge, therefore it is essential to discuss the classification of knowledge. According to the role of knowledge in the innovation process, we can divide it into architectural knowledge and component knowledge. Although we can see the detailed descriptions about these two, because of the rich content of the architectural knowledge, it is necessary to develop and divide the dimensions of architectural knowledge from the theory.Cluster is an important context for the cluster firms. Firms cannot survive and develop without the network, technical support, knowledge spillovers, and competition-cooperation relationship. Firm is the basic unit of cluster, cluster never has innovation and development without the single firm's innovation. However, most research focus on the single level, either firm or cluster. Actually the interaction between firm and cluster is meaningful to describe the innovation of firm and cluster. Therefore, we need to integrate the research from cluster and firm to explore the interaction between firm and cluster.This dissertation tries to integrate the two level research of firm and cluster from knowledge-based view, and discuss how the different types of knowledge influence cluster and firm innovation. Study one is aim to develop theoretical model from two levels, explore cluster and firm innovation through the interaction of architectural knowledge (three dimensions) and component knowledge. Study two analyzes how firm architectural knowledge influences the acquisition and absorption of component knowledge, and ultimately affects the firm innovation. In the mechanism, the factor from cluster level works as the moderator. Specifically:Based on the knowledge-based view, study one builded a model in the two levels of cluster and firm. We divided the architectural knowledge into three dimensions: structure, norm and cognition. Structure dimension refers to how the network location influences the access to resources; norm dimension mainly relates to commonly recognized rules in the long-term interaction; cognition dimension is about the shared language, narration and interpretation due to similar culture, institution and history. In general, structure dimension would influence the acquisition of component knowledge, and norm dimension and cognition dimension both affect the transformation and absorption of component knowledge. Therefore, these three dimensions would influence the acquisition, transformation and absorption of component knowledge, and the interaction between architectural knowledge and component knowledge would affect the innovative performance. Finally, we also discuss how firm architectural knowledge influence and shape cluster architectural knowledge.Study two tried to convince some propositions from the study one, and investigated the relationship between firm network density and the number of firm R&D centers, and investigated the relationship between the number of firm R&D centers and firm new product sales, moderated by cluster absorption capability. Results derived from 305 firms nested within 51 clusters revealed that firm network density is positively related to the number of firm R&D centers, while the number of firm R&D centers related positively to firm new product sales. Furthermore, the relationship between the number of firm R&D centers and firm new product sales was moderated by cluster absorption capability.In sum, the dissertation focuses on knowledge-based view to complete two separate studies by combining theoretical development and empirical evidence. It makes significant theoretical contribution to cluster knowledge-based view, social capital, architectural knowledge, component knowledge, cluster innovation and firm innovation, and it also makes practical contribution to the acquisition, flow, transformation and absorption of knowledge, cluster innovation. Finally, I discussed the research limitations of the two researches and proposed the research direction in the future.