| Today, we are standing on the world's turning point in history: one side is the past 150 years of economic leading by industry and social development, and the other side is a not named new era. Everything begins from innovation (Peter M. Senge). Innovation is a progress impetus for people and a nation. We need not only resources and mechanism but also innovation for healthy economic development (ChunJun Zhao, 2002).As the driving force of innovation, entrepreneurship has become an indispensable part of the economic growth and social development. Facing the rapidly-changing science and technology and new industry, we will increasingly see clearly, new products, new enterprise, new industry are created by the entrepreneurial activity.When small and medium-sized enterprises on the stage of creating and growing ,they must face the limitation "new" and "small", so they will be more dependent on social networks to realize the innovation. Social networks are always used to explain the use of ties to obtain knowledge, information, and resources (Birley, 1985). Social networks are thought as intangible assets important to facilitate innovative activities from individual's relations, and are important to an organization's knowledge creation (Hansen, 1999; Tsai, 2002). Dubini & Aldrich's (1991) research indicated that effective networks between firms can help the success of firms. Some research also found innovative capability is dependent on the relationships between actors in the network activities (Dewick & Miozzo, 2004).The entrepreneurial teams'social networks are the systems of relationships of entrepreneurial teams among team members and with collaborative partners outside of the firms. These networks can provide abundant sources of information and knowledge about the situation of the firm and the external environment (Collins and Clark, 2003). The internal networks focus on the collective relations that can exchange and transfer knowledge and information amongst entrepreneurial team (Coleman, 1988). External networks represent social capital, an intangible resource that can be allocated or used by entrepreneurial members on the basis of interactions in the network (Burt, 1992).The existing researches contribute to our understandings about the impacts of social networks on innovation, but the joint effects of trust of entrepreneurial teams and social networks on innovative capability have been little considered. Because trust can facilitate to transfer and exchange of information, so in this paper, we consider that the network relationships of entrepreneurial teams should provide a helpful environment to develop trust (Saparito et al., 2004). Dyer & Singh (1998) found that trust can encourage firms to establish particular resources-sharing mechanisms in order to speed their learning of specified skills, such as knowledge flow channel, information and technology transfer platforms。112 valid questionnaires enterprises Of Jilin Province showed that the internal networks and innovative capability; the external networks are also positively related to innovative capability; There will be a positive relationship between internal social networks and a firm's innovative capability when trust within an entrepreneurial team is higher. But there will be a negative relationship between external social networks and a firm's innovative capability when trust within an entrepreneurial team is higher.This paper contributes in two important ways. Firstly, we divided the concept of social networks as internal and external networks, and examine the effects on the entrepreneurial team context, which extends our understanding to the individual level. Secondly, we examine the moderation impact of trust within the entrepreneurial team on the relationship between firm's social networks and innovative capability, which extends our knowledge of trust effects on a firm's innovative capability. Trust can promote knowledge and information sharing within a firm, however, because trust would generate obstacles on information checking, it will result in negative conditions between external networks and innovative capability. |
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