Influencing Factors Of Corporate And External Knowledge Source Search Strategy

In the era of the knowledge economy and the information age, the growth and diffusion of knowledge accelerates; the product life cycle shortens; so manufacturers face fierce competition and volatile environment; consumers face a greater scale of selection. Market demands are changing and the environment is complex, and so enterprises are facing tremendous pressure from continuous innovation. These enterprises will be invincible which can complement proper technological innovation in the shortest time. As the important part of technological innovation, acquiring the needed knowledge and technology from external knowledge sources for innovation is important. So the enterprises need to make a reasonable and effective management of innovative search activities. However there are only a few researchers paying attention on the factors of the innovative search strategy.Based on the former research, this research tries to do some tentative researches using the sample of the Chinese manufacturing industry. In this study, search strategy is divided into two latitudes: search breadth and search depth. And there are two research subjects for this study. One is to identify the factors which will influence the search strategy, and the other is to do a tentative study on the relationship between the search breadth and search depth. The data is gathered mainly by the questionnaire delivered to the engineers and researchers in the firms by E-mail. It took nearly one month and about 250 copies of questionnaire were sent. And finally at least 150 questionnaires are collected and 112 of them are in effect, the available ratio is 74.6%. These samples are analyzed by the SPSS 13.0 for windows, and the reliability and the validity are both good; it is meaningful to do the further analysis. In this study, we mainly use Factor Analysis, Multiple Linear Regression and Partial Correlation Analysis to identify the factors which will influence the search strategy and relationship between the search breadth and search depth.The results suggest that:(1) Build a system of influencing factors of enterprise search strategy including the characteristics of the technology, organizational resources, market expectations, the richness of external knowledge and the search experience, and identify the relationship between the factors and search strategy.(2) The correlation coefficient of search breadth and search depth is negative, but the correlation is not significant. Possible reasons for the result are scale economies and scope economies.(3) Obtain the data of the domestic manufacturing enterprises using the external knowledge sources; And compared with the UK manufacturing industry, domestic manufacturing enterprises use more depth of competitors, Expo and Trade fair, other public sector (such as Productivity Promotion Center, etc.) and so on.(4) As the control variables, the size of enterprise and the industry are significant correlation with innovative search activities.