| The task of innovation management is vital for companies of every size in every industry. Face the strong demand of innovation firms which only use the internal technology to seek technical innovation are no longer able to generate competitive advantage. The competitiveness of firms is more depend on the use of external knowledge sources. So the firms need to make a reasonable and effective management of innovative search activities. Therefore, this paper explores the impact of the industry characteristics and the firm size on the search tactics in Chinese manufacturing firms.First, based on literature review of Open Innovation, the influence of openness to innovation performance, the impact of the industry characteristics and the firm size on the search tactics, this paper constructs an influence model of openness to innovation performance, and states four hypotheses.Furthermore, this article studies on two aspects: 1) According to the Prior researches, following the properties of open innovation, this paper divides the manufacturing industries into three catalogs. 2) The research data obtained through questionnaire. The survey was targeted at China's manufacturing industry. Using a sample of 345 valid questionnaires, this paper empirically illustrates the impact of the industry characteristics and the firm size on the search tactics.Results show that the external search breadth and depth are all curvilinearly (taking an inverted U-shape) related to the performance in each catalog. For firms which are more fit with open innovation, the optimal external search breadth is wider and the external search depth is deeper. The firm size has a strong positive impact on the degree of openness. Larger firms are able to use more knowledge from external sources.Based on the study mentioned above, combined with previous research, this paper advices on improving the performance of the open innovation activities of manufacturing firms based on external source of innovation in China. |
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