The Impact Of External Innovative Search On Cluster Firms’ Innovation Performance

Innovation plays a key role in cluster firms’upgrading. Prior literature on the upgrading of the cluster firms in developing countries has mainly focused on the local innovation system and the global value chain, the former is concerned with local knowledge and the latter is concerned with the nonlocal one. However, the business practices show that there exist some limitations of these two theories. Based on the theories of organizational learning and the innovative search, this dissertation discusses the proper way for cluster firms of handling the relationships between searching for the local knowledge and the nonlocal knowledge, thus making a positive impact on their innovation performance. Consequently, the dissertation tries to answer the following three questions step by step:(1) what are the main local and nonlocal innovation sources for cluster firms?(2) Do these different innovation sources have different impacts on the cluster firms’innovation performance?(3) What’s the proper way for cluster firms to handle the relationship between searching for local knowledge and nonlocal knowledge, thus improving their innovation performance?By integrating several different research methods, like normative analysis, interview survey, case study and empirical research, the dissertation tries to explore he above questions thoroughly and systematically. The following three parts are the main work of this dissertation:(1) This dissertation constructs the geographic-source innovative search model and distinguishes six main innovative sources. Based on the literature review of the innovative search model, the dissertation combines the dimensions of geographic origin and innovation sources of the innovative search model, and thus constructing the geographic-source innovative search model and identifying six main innovative sources for cluster firms to search for knowledge:local partners, local competitors, local organizations from outside the industry, nonlocal partners, nonlocal competitors and nonlocal organizations from outside the industry. The interview survey justifies the classification of the innovation sources and the case study probes into the different effects of the different innovation sources from local and nonlocal on the innovation performance of the cluster firms.(2) This dissertation conducts an empirical test of the effects of different ways of searching for knowledge on the cluster firms’ innovation performance. Through the processes, like the design of the questionnaire, the questionnaire survey, the data collection and the data analysis etc., the research hypothesis is tested and the conclusions are drawn as follows:the way cluster firms search for the local competitors’ knowledge and the nonlocal partners’knowledge will improve their innovation performance; the way cluster firms search for the knowledge from the nonlocal organizations from outside the industry will negatively affect their innovation performance; and there is no significant effect on the innovation performance for the cluster firms to search for knowledge from the local partners, the nonlocal competitors and the local organizations from outside the industry.(3) Based on the research of ambidexterity, this dissertation discusses the effects of adopting different balancing methods on the cluster firms’ innovation performance. Through the normative research and empirical research, this dissertation draws the following conclusions:(1) There are two dimensions of ambidexterity, one is Balanced dimension of ambidexterity (BD) and the other Combined dimension (CD). There will be a positive effect on the cluster firms’ innovation performance if they adopt the BD and CD on searching for their local partners and nonlocal partners’ knowledge.(2) There will be a negative effect on the cluster firms’ innovation performance if they adopt CD on searching for the knowledge from the local and nonlocal organizations from outside industry.At last, the dissertation discusses its practical implications to cluster firms’ managers, the limitation of this research and the future research directions.