Study On The Relationship Among Alliance Portfolio Configuration,Knowledge Coupling And Enterprise Innovation Ability

Technological innovation activities have important strategic significance,which can not only overturn the existing technology paradigm,but also destroy the existing business model.However,in the face of changing technology paradigm and unstable customer demand,knowledge and skills across organizational boundaries are often needed,making external network an increasingly important source of technology research and development.Therefore,enterprises choose members with different industry attributes or across different knowledge boundaries to build alliance network relations,so as to enhance horizontal or vertical cross-integration in the field of technology paradigm,and then improve the innovation ability of enterprises.When enterprises maintain partnership with various strategic alliance actors at the same time,alliance portfolio come into being.Alliance portfolio is beneficial for enterprises to carry out inter-organizational learning across alliance boundaries and become an effective carrier of inter-alliance heterogeneous knowledge and resource flow.In addition,it helps reduce the risk and uncertainty in the process of technological innovation,so as to avoid the "lock-in effect" of technological innovation.At present,some research literatures have focused on the innovation benefits brought by alliance portfolio configuration to focus enterprises.However,there are still few studies on the internal mechanism and specific contingency factors of how alliance portfolio configuration affects the innovation ability of enterprises,and there are still some differences in the conclusions of the existing researches.Therefore,based on social network theory,resource-based view,theory of knowledge creation and dynamic capability theory,this dissertation closely focuses on the basic theoretical question of "how alliance portfolio configuration affects enterprise innovation capability",to establish "alliance portfolio configuration-knowledge coupling-enterprise innovation ability" of theoretical framework.The following three sub-questions are taken as the main core clues to analyze the contents of this dissertation:(1)In the alliance portfolio constructed by the focus enterprises,what is the relationship between alliance portfolio configuration and innovation ability?(2)What is the influence path between alliance portfolio configuration and enterprise innovation capability?(3)Will different alliance management capability(cooperative proactiveness capability and relational governance capability)have different impacts on the above mechanism?In order to answer these aforementioned questions,this dissertation combines normative analysis with empirical analysis and gradually discusses three sub-studies.1.On the basis of combing and analyzing the existing research results,sub-study one selects three typical enterprises in the field of manufacturing,biology and electronic information to conduct exploratory case study.Based on the theoretical conception derived from practice,the analytical framework of the relationship between alliance portfolio configuration and enterprise innovation ability is preliminarily formed,and the initial hypothesis proposition of this study is put forward.It points out that the diversity of alliance partners,the strength of relationship connection,the power of network location and the shared vision in alliance portfolio can improve the innovation ability of enterprises by improving the coupling of supplementary knowledge and complementary knowledge.2.Based on the initial theoretical model,the research hypotheses and conceptual model between alliance portfolio configuration and enterprise innovation ability are proposed.Through the collection of questionnaires from 385 local enterprises,the structural equation model is further used to empirically test the research hypotheses of alliance portfolio configuration,knowledge coupling and enterprise innovation ability.3.On the basis of the above research,the sub-study three introduces the moderating variable of alliance management capability to investigate whether it causes variation in the influence mechanism of alliance portfolio configuration on knowledge coupling.Through multiple regression analysis,a moderating effect model of alliance management capabilities(cooperative proactiveness capability and relational governance capability)influencing alliance portfolio configuration and knowledge coupling relationship is finally formed.Based on the above research work,the main conclusions of this dissertation are as follows:1.Among the alliance portfolio constructed by focus enterprises,alliance portfolio configuration has a positive impact on their innovation capabilities.Through the field interviews with Chinese local enterprises and the questionnaire research on 385 enterprises,this dissertation shows that the diversity of alliance partners,the strength of relationship connection,the power of network location and the shared vision in the alliance portfolio can all contribute to the improvement of the innovation ability.2.Alliance portfolio configuration affects the innovation ability of enterprises by affecting knowledge coupling.Structural equation modeling results based on 385 enterprises reveal that supplementary knowledge coupling is not valid in mediating the relationship between the diversity of alliance partners and the innovation ability,while complementary knowledge coupling completely mediates the relationship between the diversity of alliance partners and innovation ability.On the contrary,supplementary knowledge coupling and complementary knowledge coupling play a part in mediating the relationship between the strength of relationship connection,network location power,shared vision on enterprise innovation ability respectively.3.Alliance management capability plays an important moderating role in the mechanism of alliance portfolio configuration on knowledge coupling.The results of multiple regression analysis of 385 enterprises in this dissertation show that the ability of cooperative proactiveness and relational governance fail in moderating the strength of relationship connection and supplementary knowledge coupling.On the contrary,cooperative proactiveness capability and relational governance capability have significant moderating effects on the diversity of alliance partners,network location power,shared vision on supplementary knowledge coupling,respectively.Cooperative proactiveness capability and relational governance capability significantly moderates the effects of the diversity of alliance partners,the strength of relationship connection,the power of network location,the shared vision on complementary knowledge coupling,respectively.In general,the research conclusions of this dissertation deepen the understanding of the basic question of "how the alliance portfolio configuration affects the innovation capability of enterprises".Its major research contributions are as follows:1.The connotation and dimension of alliance portfolio configuration are further defined.This dissertation holds that the alliance portfolio configuration is the quality,quantity and diversity of information and resources that the focus enterprises can obtain through the alliance portfolio,the effectiveness of obtaining network resources,and the flexibility or stability of the position of the focus enterprises in the cross-organizational field.Furthermore,in view of partner dimension,relationship dimension,structure dimension and cognitive dimension,the alliance portfolio configuration is divided into four dimensions: alliance partner diversity,relationship connection strength,network location power and shared vision.On this basis,combined with the existing research on alliance partner diversity,relationship connection strength,network location power and shared vision,the measurement scale of alliance portfolio configuration is developed and applied to the empirical study in this dissertation.Therefore,it helps to fill the gap in the explanation of alliance portfolio configuration and expand the situational frontier of social network theory.2.This dissertation analyzes the essential process of how alliance portfolio configuration affects the innovation ability of enterprises,which promotes the research of knowledge coupling to develop in depth,and provides a new perspective for the research of alliance portfolio management and innovation activities.On the basis of the existing theoretical research,case study and empirical research,this dissertation deeply analyzes the mechanism of alliance portfolio configuration affecting the innovation ability of enterprises,and systematically connects alliance portfolio configuration,knowledge coupling and innovation ability theory.At the same time,local knowledge and non-local knowledge,similar knowledge and heterogeneous knowledge are put into the same analysis framework,and then the knowledge coupling are refined into two important aspects: supplementary knowledge coupling and complementary knowledge coupling.On the basis of exploring the research proposition of "how to play a role in the alliance portfolio configuration of focus enterprises",this dissertation opens and excavates the black box of the influence mechanism of alliance portfolio configuration on the innovation ability of enterprises.In addition,knowledge coupling(supplementary knowledge coupling and complementary knowledge coupling)as the mediating variable is introduced to influence the innovation ability of enterprises in different dimensions of alliance portfolio configuration,and the theoretical framework of "alliance portfolio configuration-knowledge coupling-enterprise innovation ability" is established.3.This dissertation explains the moderating mechanism of alliance management capability on alliance portfolio configuration and knowledge coupling.Few existing literatures focus on the functional situation of alliance portfolio configuration from the contingency perspective of alliance management.In this dissertation,it is considered that the effect of alliance portfolio configuration on knowledge coupling will be affected by the alliance management capability and will show different changes.Therefore,this dissertation takes two dimensions of alliance management capabilities(cooperative proactiveness capability and relational governance capability)as moderating variables to investigate the influence of alliance portfolio configuration on knowledge coupling relationship.Research shows that different alliance management capabilities affect the knowledge coupling mechanism in the alliance portfolio.This conclusion extends the depth of existing alliance portfolio and knowledge coupling research,and provides new management thinking and practical guidance for focus enterprises to configure appropriate alliance portfolio strategy and knowledge coupling under different alliance management capabilities.