Informal Innovation Networks Influencing Factors And The Role Of Empirical Research

At the end of the 20th century, the success of Silicon Valley attracted the whole world's attention and lots of countries tried to learn from Silicon Valley's success. Just as many scholars had pointed out, the lessons we learned from Silicon Valley should not limit to the institutions, to the contrary, some non-institutional factors were more important for the development of Silicon Valley. Informal innovation network and informal communication were such factors. They greatly promoted the diffusion of tacit knowledge and improved the innovative capability of Silicon Valley.This paper analyzed the condition the influential factors and the function of the informal innovation network between researchers and developers in Chinese high-tech companies. The analysis was carried out at the level of individuals.This paper combined qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis together, and constructed the research frame on the basis of reading former research articles and interviewing the researchers and developers from different high-tech companies. We checked up our hypotheses through analyzing questionnaire datum and the research tool was SPSS.Through the questionnaire, we got plenty of information about the informal innovation network in China, including the researchers and developers' evaluation on it's function, the researchers and developers' willingness and frequency in attending informal innovation network and the common way of informal communication. We found some factors which could affect informal communication, and the influential factors from outside, for example, the support of company and local culture, were proved more effective than the factors from inside, for instance extraversion personality and personal experience. So we could declare that the companies and the government really can do something to promote researchers and developers attending informal innovation network. We proved that cluster really promoted the development of informal communication, and informal communication really promoted the development of researchers and developers' innovative capability. So there was a circle in it.At last, on the basis of demonstration, we gave some advice on how to develop the informal innovation network in Chinese high-tech industry clusters.