Ambidextrous Innovation And New Venture Performance

In the context of transition economies,innovation and entrepreneurial activities play an vital role in the development of Chinese economics,which has become a new engine to promote the social and economic development in China.According to the Globe Entrepreneurship Monitor(GEM)research data,entrepreneurial activity index is increasing year by year and has become one of the most active countries in entrepreneurial activities.However,the value of entrepreneurial activity lies not only in the activity of entrepreneurship and the increase in the number of new ventures,but also in the promotion of entrepreneurial quality and the healthy development of new ventures.Therefore,how to improve the survival rate and development potential of new ventures has become an important issue in innovation and entrepreneurship research.Faced with the turbulent environment and increasingly fierce competition,innovation has become an important driving force for enterprise development,and it is an important way for enterprises to acquire and maintain their competitive advantage.Since the ambidextrous theory was put forward,many scholars have studied the innovation of enterprises from the ambidextrous perspective,and pointed out that if enterprises want to achieve long-term development,they need to pursue both explorative innovation and exploitative innovation.Enterprises not only need to meet the existing products and market demand for short-term benefits,but also maintain the ability to adapt to changes in the external environment to develop and explore new market opportunities for obtaining and maintaining long-term competitive advantage.However,the existing research on the relationship between ambidextrous innovation and organizational performance has not reached an agreement.At the same time,the impact of ambidextrous innovation on new ventures performance may be different,and the relationship between the two has not yet been clear and needs further analysis and exploration.Compared with mature enterprises,because of “liability of newness” and “liability of smallness”,new ventures are faced with serious resource constraints and low efficiency of resource utilization in the process of development,which makes it more complex to carry out innovation activities.How to acquire,integrate and utilize the knowledge and resources needed for innovation has become the key factor for new ventures with resource constraints to carry out innovation activities and improve the innovation performance.Under this background,new ventures generally choose to participate in cooperative or industrial networks formed by different enterprises,and acquire the knowledge and resources needed for innovation through the social network in which new ventures are embedded and conduct cross-organizational learning to promote innovation performance.Therefor,for new ventures,how to participate in external networks and maintain cooperative relationships with network actors to acquire the knowledge and resources and integrate with existing knowledge and resources to explore and exploit new knowledge and opportunities has become an important issue for innovative research of new ventures.Although many scholars analyze the innovation of enterprises from the perspective of social network,most of them neglect that the network structure is composed of multiple levels,namely firm level,pair level and network level.Most of the current researches tend to discuss innovation issues only at a single level.And few studies focus on the impact of multilevel of network structure and multilevel interactions effect of network structures on innovation and organizational performance.This makes it easy to lose some of the richness in the data,and it is difficult to analyze and compare the different mechanisms of the effect of different levels of network structure on innovation and performance improvement.Based on above,in order to supplement and improve existing researches,this paper will analyze the impact of ambidextrous innovation on new venture performance,and focus on the impact mechanism of different levels of network structure and their interactions on the above relationships from the perspective of multi-level network structure.Based on above background and theoretical problems,this study attempts to study the following questions:(1)From the ambidextrous perspective,this study will analyze how ambidextrous innovation: explorative innovation and exploitative innovation,influences new venture performance;(2)From the perspective of multilevel network structure,this study will analyze the moderating effect of different levels of network structure on the relationship between ambidextrous innovation and new venture performance.(3)Treating network level variables as network context variables,this paper will analyze the joint moderating effect of different levels of network structure on the relationship between ambidextrous innovation and new venture performance from the perspective of multilevel interaction.Based on the systematic review of the relevant theories and literatures,this paper defines the main variables and divides the dimensions,including ambidextrous innovation,multilevel network structure and new venture performance.In this paper,ambidextrous innovation is divided into two dimensions : explorative innovation and exploitative innovation.This study breaks the paradigm of single-level network and explores the moderating effect of multilevel network structure on the relationship between ambidextrous innovation and new venture performance by constructing a joint moderating effect model of ambidextrous innovation,multilevel network structure and new venture performance and put forward 18 theoretical hypotheses.We use questionnaire to obtain 408 valid samples,and uses both SPSS23.0 software and AMOS24.0 software to test the sample data.The results show that in all 18 hypotheses,16 hypotheses are supported by data,and 2 hypotheses are without data support.In order to ensure the reliability of the research conclusions,robust checks were conducted in this paper.The research contents and main conclusions of this paper are as follows:Firstly,from the ambidextrous perspective,this paper analyzes the impact of the two dimensions of ambidextrous innovation,exploratory innovation and exploitative innovation,on new venture performance.The research results show that exploratory innovation and exploitative innovation are positively related with new venture performance.Secondly,from the perspective of multilevel network structure,this paper analyzes the moderating effect of different levels of network structure on the relationship between ambidextrous innovation and new venture performance.The research results show that network centrality of firm level,network intensity of pair-level,network density and network stability of network-level positively regulates the relationship between ambidextrous innovation and new venture performance.Thirdly,from the perspective of multilevel interaction,network level variables are regarded as network context variable.This paper analyzes the joint moderating effect of different levels of network structure on the relationship between ambidextrous innovation and new venture performance.The research results show that network density and network centrality have negative joint moderating effect on the relationship between exploratory innovation\exploitative innovation and new venture performance;network density and network intensity have positive joint moderating effect on the relationship between exploitative innovation and new venture performance;network stability and network centrality have positive joint moderating effect on the relationship between exploitative innovation and new venture performance;network stability and network intensity have positive joint moderating effect on the relationship between exploratory innovation\exploitative innovation and new venture performance.The contribution of this article can be summarized as the following points:Firstly,from the perspective of ambidextrous theory and multilevel network structure,this paper built an integrated model of imporving the performance of new venture and carried out the empirical study with survey data.Based on ambidextrous theory,social network theory and resource-based theory,this paper integrates multilevel network structure,ambidextrous innovation and new venture performance into a research framework,and builds a complete and cross-level conceptual framework,which is a further enrichment and development of research on multilevel network structure and enterprise performance.Secondly,this paper supplements and improves the conceptual system and theoretical system of multilevel network structure.A key strength of the network approach is its potential for multilevel analysis.However,the existing research literatures mostly studied the innovation and growth of enterprises from a single network level,and few studies focused on the influence of different levels of network on enterprise development.This paper breaks the paradigm of single-level network,and analyzes the characteristics and functions of different levels of network structure.This paper further complements and improves the conceptual system and theoretical system of multilevel network structure,which is a supplement and improvement of the existing research on multilevel network theory research.Thirdly,from the perspective of multilevel network structure,this paper analyzes the moderating effect of different levels of network structure on the relationship between ambidextrous innovation and new venture performance.This study can verify which level of network structure will impact on innovation and performance improvement.It helps to further analysis and explore the path and mechanism of impact from ambidextrous innovation to performance,and further clarify the important value of social network theory in the research of above relationship.Fourthly,in this paper,network level variables is regarded as network context variables,and analyze the joint moderating effect of different levels of network structure on the relationship between ambidextrous innovation and new venture performance.From the perspective of network-level interaction,this study analyzes network centrality and network intensity play an important role in enterprise innovation and performance improvement in which network context.This contributes to understand the multilevel interaction effect of multilevel network structure.And it will be an innovative research topic for academic research.