Social Capital And Technological Innovation Performance In The Public Relations Perspective Relations

Technology innovation is the key element to gain competitive advantages and sustainable development for nations and especially for firms, the main bodies of market competition. With the development of economic and knowledge globalization, innovation usually happens through dynamic integrations and collaborative networks, which needs support and trust from publics. However only firms with more social capital are able to get more publics' support and trust. 'Social capital' refers to features of social organization, such as networks, norms, and trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit. At the mean while, technology innovation can also be regarded as a social process, which can be accelerated by social capital creation.So far, almost no explicit attention has been directed toward the effect of social capital on innovation, but with the development of economic globalization, this relationship is becoming more and more important. By evaluating social capital in three dimensions, namely scale of network, depth of relations and frequency of contacts, this paper discusses the relationship between social capital and innovation performance in technology in view of public relations. Building upon the theories of social capital and technology innovation, propositions are developed to examine the corporate social capital's impact on its innovation performance. Based on 68 telecom hardware manufacture enterprises in mainland China from 2004-2006, it found support for this paper's propositions. Finally, the work concludes that firm's social capital can increase its performance of innovation by facilitating information acquisition, knowledge acquisition and capital acquisition from its external social networks and firms can gain social capital by building and maintaining good relations with publics to expand the scale of external social networks and enhance the trust from all the publics.