The Impact Of Intermediaries On SMEs Innovation Performance

SMEs'capability building faces three main problems:innovation resource availability, resource accessibility, and capability of utilizing resources. Recent researches have shown that intermediaries play a huge role in SMEs'capability building. However, most of them only foucs on the general functions, not make a deep study in the cooperation between them and the mechanism.This paper tries to explore roles intermediaries play for SMEs in depth. What are the functions indeed intermediaries have for SMEs? What is their effect on SMEs'innovation performance? Which cooperation type matches which learning model? Based on previous theoretical and empirical research, we develop a theoretical model and several research hypotheses. Using questionnaire survey, the main conclusions are as follows.Intermadiaries, on one hand, help SMEs build abundant links with others, broaden the scope of their external innovation search and reduce their search cost. On the other hand, intermadiaries can be the pool and circulation channel of various resource and information. Furtherly, we define the cooperation as resource-based cooperation and information-based cooperation.Exploratory learning has mediating effect for both resource-based cooperation and information-based cooperation. Exploitative learning only has mediating effect for information-based cooperation. The possible reseasons mainly depend on the different characteristics of resource and information, and the mechanism of organization learning.Faced with the ever changing market and technoloy environment, SMEs prefer to utilize their resource and information through exploratory learning. Environmental dynamism plays an positive moderationg role in the mechanism of exploratory learning, and an negative role in the mechanism of exploitative learning.