The Impact Of Cooperation R&D Network Embeddedness On Firm's New Product Development Performance

The promotion of " The Belt and Road" cooperation initiative provides favorable economical conditions for the products of China's high-tech firms to go abroad,and has also brought new opportunities to the new product development.Firms are established for survival,and the success of new product development is essentially used to prove that firms can not only grow in the market,but also thrive in the competitive business environment.The continuous change of the current business environment,the rapid change of customer's preferences and expectations,the acceleration of new technology diffusion,the shortening of product life cycle and the constant increase of product types lead to the constant increase of uncertainty,which further affects the change of organizational performance of firms.Therefore,the everchanging business environment is the most important driving force for firms to compete successfully.By developing and introducing new and innovative products,firms can improve,maintain and keep their competitive advantages.Most new product development activities experience a severe shortage of resources across all business functions,and many of the symptoms that plague new product development can be traced directly to this shortage of resources.Open innovation theory holds that firms increasingly acquire technical knowledge from external sources to improve their innovation performance.Nowadays,firms widely use the external knowledge obtained from the collaborative network among enterprises to develop new products.In addition,relational theory and social capital theory also believe that the cooperative R&D network embeddedness has become an important mechanism for firm to acquire exogenous knowledge.In terms of industries and firms,it is very important to analyze how the embeddedness of collaborative R&D network affects the performance of new product development.Thus,this paper studies the impact of network embeddedness and knowledge base of collaborative R&D network on new product development performance,mainly including the following contents:(1)Model construction of the impact of embeddedness in collaborative R&D network on firms' new product development performance.Based on the resourcebased theory and collaborative innovation theory,this paper puts forward the influence path of collaborative R&D network structural embeddedness and relational embeddedness on new product development performance.As the knowledge origin of technological innovation and new product development,knowledge base is the inevitable result of expanding knowledge scope and deepening knowledge from inside and outside of firm.Based on this,knowledge breadth and knowledge depth are discussed as the mediate mechanism between the collaborative R&D network embeddednessa nd new product development performance.The knowledge cultivation strategy of an enterprise cannot be separated from the influence of the environment it is in,based on contingency theory,we analyse the moderating effects of technological and environmental dynamics on knowledge base and new product development performance.(2)Research on the direct impact of collaborative R&D network embeddedness of on new product development performance.We use the degree of network centrality and structure hole to measure collaborative R&D network structural embeddedness,and tie strength and tie breadth to measure collaborative R&D network relational embeddedness.The mechanism of their influence on the performance of new product development is discussed and hypotheses are put forward accordingly.We using Chinese automobile industry as the research object,the collaborative R&D network is constructed based on patent data,and the research hypothesis is empirically tested by combining firms' new product data and property data.The results show that all network centrality,structure hole,tie strength and tie breadth can promote the new product development performance.(3)The mediation effect of firm's knowledge base.High-tech firms cultivate knowledge by expanding the scope of knowledge or deepening knowledge.Firstly,the knowledge base is brought into the analysis framework,which reveals the "black box" of the impact of the collaborative R&D network embeddedness on the new product development performance.Secondly,the important impact of technological diversification on the new product development performance is analyzed,which proves that it is meaningful for enterprises to extend the knowledge breadth to different fields.Then,the mechanism of knowledge breadth and depth as mediating variables is analyzed and hypotheses are put forward.Finally,empirical analysis shows that knowledge breadth plays a partial mediating role between network centrality,tie strength and new product development performance,while it has a complete mediating role between network structure hole and tie breadth and new product development performance.Knowledge depth plays a partial mediating role between collaborative R&D network structural and relational embeddedness.(4)We introduce environmental dynamics as a moderating variable,and divides it into technological and market dynamics,then analyzes their contingent effects on knowledge base and new product development performance,and proposes hypotheses.The empirical analysis shows that both technical and market dynamics have positive moderating effects on knowledge breadth and knowledge depth and new product development performance.In this paper,we based on the resource-based theory,collaborative innovation theory,transaction cost theory and the knowledge-based theory,build the knowledge base as the mediation variables between the relationship of the cooperative R&D network embeddedness and new product development performance,while the environment dynamics as the moderator of knowledge base and new product development performance,and use the empirical analysis to test the hypothesis.The research conclusion enriches and expands the research related to innovation management and knowledge base,and provides important suggestions for high-tech firms to carry out scientific knowledge management with the help of collaborative R&D network in practice.