Research On Decision-making Mechanism Of Collaborative Innovation Within China's Manufacturing Industry Cluster

Since the beginning of this century,the global manufacturing industry has undergone great changes in the internal and external environments and faced increasing difficulty and threshold for technological innovations,so the changes in the innovative environment greatly affect the strategic decisions of manufacturing enterprises on innovations,which is mainly reflected in the following three aspects.First,enterprises face a rising threshold for R&D and show an increasingly obvious trend of resource integration.As the information technology popularizes,there are conditions created for knowledge sharing in the manufacturing industry,and the first-mover advantages of enterprises based on technological innovations are disappearing rapidly.With increasingly active technological innovations,the development trend and breakthrough direction of technology become more variable,which brings about more unpredictable effects on the market,so enterprises face more risks to make innovations.Second,an increasing number of manufacturing enterprises begin to seek collaborative innovations with others,which carry out R&D through the collaborative mechanisms such as resource complementation,knowledge integration,risk and revenue sharing,so that in complex R&D they can allocate resources in a more flexible and efficient manner and reduce the risk of innovation to a great extent.Third,manufacturing enterprises under collaborative innovations are both R&D partners and market competitors,so they have to deal with the coexisting collaborative and competitive relations effectively.Such composite relationship has far-reaching effects on the collaborative and competitive decisions so that manufacturing enterprises have a more subtle and complicated decision mechanism on collaborative innovations.Under this background,it is a question worth consideration by the Chinese manufacturing industry to promote the innovation capability and international competitiveness through the collaborative innovation strategy among the enterprises in the whole industrial cluster.The research on the collaborative innovation decision mechanism in the manufacturing industry cluster is of great practical significance for promoting the overall innovation capability,transformation and upgrading of the Chinese manufacturing industry and strengthening the core starting force of regional economic development,which also has positive theoretical significance for exploring the construction of collaborative innovation system suitable for the national conditions of China and enriching research related to collaborative innovations.This research focuses on the following three problems.First,it systematically analyzes the structured decision process of manufacturing enterprises in collaborative innovations,which lays a theoretical foundation for the further analysis on the decision mechanism as well as the factors affecting the decision performance.Second,it analyzes the decision mechanism of enterprises in the manufacturing industry cluster.Third,it studies the main factors that affect the decision performance in the manufacturing industry cluster.This research makes the following innovations.First,it summarizes the operation mechanism of the collaborative innovation system in the manufacturing industry cluster based on the collaborative and competitive relationship between manufacturing enterprises in collaborative innovations.Second,it defines and analyzes the problems of the decision mechanism in the manufacturing industry cluster under different types of innovation activities based on the characteristics of technology innovation activities in the manufacturing industry.Third,based on the link between the macro and micro levels,it systematically puts forward the mechanism of mutual restriction and interaction between the innovative decisions by manufacturing enterprises and the development of the manufacturing industry.Under the background of collaborative innovations in the manufacturing cluster,this research analyzes the operation of collaborative innovation system and the decision mechanism of enterprises.Based on the theories of collaborative innovation and industrial cluster,it uses empirical analysis and mathematical modeling to study the decision mechanism of manufacturing industry cluster and enterprises in collaborative innovations.This research consists of the following parts:The first part contains makes an introduction to this research in Chapter 1.First,it describes the research background of this research as well as the theoretical and practical significance.Second,it systematically reviews the Chinese and overseas literature in several research fields related to this research issue,including the research results in terms of industrial cluster,collaborative innovation,innovation diffusion,and manufacturing industry cluster,and briefly reviewed the existing research.Third,it elaborates the contents and framework of this research.Finally,it explains the main methods and innovations in this research.The second part deals with the theoretical basis in Chapter 2.It describes relevant basic theories involved in this research,including collaborative innovation,innovation diffusion,industrial cluster,and knowledge alliance,elaborates the basic principles and views of these theories and explains the relationship between these theories and this research.The third part analyzes the collaborative innovation system of manufacturing industry cluster as well as the decision process of enterprises in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4.Chapter 3 analyzes the internal functional elements and external environment of the collaborative innovation system in the manufacturing industry cluster at the macro level,which lays emphasis on the status quo,characteristics and external conditions for the Chinese manufacturing industry cluster to construct the collaborative innovation system.Chapter 4 elaborates and analyzes the information,design,selection and evaluation activities of manufacturing enterprises in collaborative innovation decisions at the micro level.The fourth part researches the decision mechanism in the manufacturing industry cluster in Chapter 5 and Chapter 6.Chapter 5 researches the decision-making problems of enterprises in breakthrough activities in terms of collaborative innovations,analyzes the effects of different environmental parameters and market variables on breakthrough innovation decisions,understands and analyzes the main factors affecting the decisions of enterprises as well as the principle of interaction between these factors.Chapter 6 analyzes in depth the collaborative effect and knowledge spillover,the two characteristics of the manufacturing industry cluster in incremental collaborative innovations and explored the decision-making problems of different enterprises inside and outside the innovation alliance in incremental collaborative innovations.The fifth part empirically analyzes the performance of collaborative innovation in Chapter 7,which mainly analyzes in depth the main factors affecting the performance of collaborative innovation of enterprises based on the motivation and external environment of enterprises in the manufacturing industry cluster to carry out collaborative innovations and from the perspectives of external environment for collaborative innovations,management decisions of enterprises,and collaboration of innovation subjects.The sixth part draws conclusions and makes prospects in Chapter 7,which mainly summarizes the research contents and related conclusions,explains the deficiencies in the research and describes the future research directions.This research draws three conclusions as follows.First,as major strategic decisions related to the future development direction of manufacturing enterprises,collaborative innovation decisions are more applicable for the structured decision process,so the successful decision process should improve decision quality and reduce decision risk from collaborative innovation information protection,technology formation mechanism,mode selection and performance evaluation.Second,despite the similarities in the manifestation,breakthrough and incremental innovations have certain differences in the decision mechanism.On the one hand,both breakthrough and incremental collaborative innovations have a unique optimal level of resource input,and collaborative and competitive levels in the industry significantly affect the decision of enterprises on resource input and market competition in collaborative innovations.In the early development stage of technological innovations,the collaborative effect dominates,while in the middle and late stages,the competitive effect prevails.On the other hand,the knowledge spillover level has significantly different effects on the resource input and market competition by enterprises inside and outside the innovation alliance.Third,the external environmental factors of manufacturing enterprises have significantly positive effects on the internal capability of enterprises in collaborative innovations,and the collaborative factors between manufacturing enterprises and other innovative subjects can affect the collaborative innovation performance of enterprises directly or through the intermediary effects of internal capability factors.