Effects Of Behavior Characteristic Of Coopetition Strategy On Change Performance For Firms In Industry Cluster: An Inter-organization Learning Perspective

With the development of globalization and minute division of production, great changes have taken place in the industry. The fast pace of information require companies to contuniously update their knowledge. Customers's changing demand and technological change all bring a lot uncertainty to companies. So nowadays innovation has become a sustainable core competency for companies. Since many SMEs are going through industrial cluster updating, more and more companies has come to realize that one company along can not survive in the industry without parternership with other companies. Many companies are facing challenges like how to cooperate and compete with other companies in the industry, how to improve its financial performance, how to deal with internal and external enviromntal changes. All these problems have been holding SMEs back.Interview research has been used in the study as well as field survey. In investigating over 100 SMEs in Shaoxing, Jiaxing & Shanghai, etc and doing hypothesis testing with the data collected, we come up with the following conclusions:1. Coopetition strategy for companies in cluster has four characteristic dimension: strategic exploration, transactional exploration, tacit exploitation and competitive exploitation.2. Coopetition strategy and three of its dimensions positively influence the change performance for companies in industry cluster.3. Coopetition strategy and its four dimensions positively influence the inter-organziational learning for companies industry cluster.4. Inter-organziational learning and its four dimensions will positively influence the change performance for companies in industry cluster.5. Inter-organziational learning and its four dimensions compeletely intermediate the relationship between coopetition strategy and change performance for companies in industry cluster. 6. Inter-organziational trust completely moderates the relationship between coopetition strategy and change performance.Based on the above conclusions, we suggest that companies in industry clustr should develop an appropriate coopetition strategy by determining its specific coopetition strategy characteristic, and focused more on enhancing inter-organizational learning. We also suggest that companies should develop inter-organizational trust to enhance inter-organizational learning.