Non-R&D Innovation:a Theoretical Framework And Its Impacting Effects On Innovation Performance Of SMEs

Under the influence of global economical and financial crisis, Chinese Small&Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are facing tremendous challenges. On the one hand, R&D is treated as the main way of corporate innovation, or even the only one. On the other hand, SMEs mostly do not have the ability to carry out R&D based innovation activities, while some of them are very innovative with no R&D activities. Therefore, conducting research on non-R&D innovation in SMEs can both promote the development of innovation theory and provide SMEs with new thinking on innovation.What the typical non-R&D innovation activities in Chinese SMEs are, how non-R&D innovation affects innovation performance? What kind of factors will affect non-R&D innovation? Research on those issues is much necessary and greatly needed. In this context, focusing on non-R&D innovation in Chinese SMEs, this paper does a research on theoretical framework of non-R&D innovation and its influence on innovation performance. Through analysis of data from398questionnaires, theoretical models are modified and research assumptions are validated. Based on the results of case study and empirical analysis results, the main conclusions of this paper are as follows.(1) In the context of Chinese SMEs, non-R&D innovation activities have significant positive influence on innovation performance. Empirical results show that, technological and knowledge adoption activity, improvement and imitation activity, activities related to marketing or organizational innovation can improve SMEs’ innovation performance significantly. Non-R&D innovation activities play important part in SMEs’ innovation process.(2) Absorptive capacity partly moderates the relationship between non-R&D innovation and firm’s innovation performance. Abilities of knowledge managing, learning, and transforming will affect the impacting effect of some non-R&D innovation activities, such as improvement and imitation activities, innovation activities related to marketing, and so on. (3) Both internal innovative resources and external innovative environment are positively related to non-R&D innovation activities. Besides influence of firm specific characteristics and external innovative environment, the human resources, financial resources, and technological resources will also positively affect non-R&D innovation activities in SMEs.Based on existing research, with a large sample data from Chinese SMEs, this paper has advanced a systematic study of non-R&D innovation in SMEs. Firstly, the theoretical model is put forward in the context of Chinese SMEs, which makes a complement to the theoretical studies of innovation in SMEs. Secondly, this paper validates the positive relationship between non-R&D innovation activities and innovation performance with data from398questionnaires. However, limited by the author’s research ability and time, there is a certain shortage of research in this article, which is discussed in the last part of the paper.