Interactive Innovation:Interactive Learning And Innovation Capability Upgrading Mechanism Research

China has achieved rapid sustainable economic growth into a middle income country mostly depended by manufacturing industries in 30 years of reform and opening up.How to realize the sustainable economic development and turn from a big manufacturing country into a powerful manufacturing country,one of the key factors is to take innovation as the driving power source of industry development and to enhance enterprises' innovation capability rapidly.As a way of crossing different participating boundaries for ideas,technologies and solutions,Interaction provides a way of using external knowledge and capabilities.Innovation happens with knowledge transformation through interactive learning.As the learning and inspiring process,interactive innovation may be an effective way to adapt the environment and to enhance innovation capability of enterprises.Focusing on innovation capability,this research mainly emphasized the promoting relationship from interactive learning level to the external environment to innovation capability upon the research bases of the interactive innovation theory,organization learning theory,creativity and innovation ability theory.The research goes with the following steps:(1)Literature review and theoretical development.The research was established after the literature review of interactive innovation theory,organization learning theory,creativity and innovation ability theory.The concepts of interactive learning,absorptive capability,innovation capability and other related concepts were defined upon the literature review.These concepts formed the basis of the following research and demonstration.(2)Exploratory case study.Four typical cases were chosen for in-depth exploring study.The initial research proposition to the relationship of interactive learning,absorptive capability and innovation capability is set after the processes of theoretical presupposition,data collection,inner-case analysis,inter-cases comparison.These propositions provided us a practical based research vision for the following researching steps.(3)Upon the literature review of innovation capability,a new measuring framework was proposed.Through the exploratory factor analysis for the data from 335 manufacturing SMEs,the measuring index of opportunities identifying,proactive and commitment to innovation,organizing capability,and innovative culture were developed.One amazing discovery appeared that the innovative culture should be divided into institutional culture and innovative atmosphere.(4)The mechanism of interactive innovation was put forward and the hypotheses were tested using a sample of 331 Chinese manufacturing firms.In Mplus7 software,CFA and SEM were used to deeply analyze the mechanism of interactive innovation.This dissertation comes to the following main conclusions based on the above mentioned analysis:(1)The innovation capability can be tested by the framework of opportunity identification capacity,innovation realizing capacity and commercializing capacity which is in accordant with innovation process of enterprises.The opportunity identification capacity and the commercializing capacity can be measured by index already existed.The innovation realizing capacity can be measured by innovation inputs,strategic capacity,organizing capacity,institutional culture and innovation atmosphere of an enterprise.(2)The absorptive capacity mediates the interactive learning and innovation capacity.The activating motives play a more important role than the inner-firm knowledge in the mediation process.Considering the knowledge capacities of Lichtenthaler&Lichtenthaler(2009),the interactive innovation mechanism clearly exhibited the relationship to firms' knowledge capacities.The environmental turbulence and complexity of innovation activities force the enterprise to learn from external knowledge.The knowledge proximity of the enterprise are the key to access external knowledge and learn interactively.This result provides an effective way for SMEs to upgrade their innovation capabilities.In general,this original research of innovation capacity measurement index and interactive innovation mechanism to manufacturing SMEs provide some theoretical advancement and has some realistic implications to innovative practices of enterprises.