A Study Of The Impact Of External Innovation Sources On Enterprise’s Innovation Performance

In the contemporary ear of knowledge economy globalization, knowledge flows across different enterprises became more and more fast, the traditional innovation model characterized with strict control in the internal innovation process cannot meet the rapid needs of product development, more and more external innovation sources began to act as the "innovation reservoir" in the innovation process. Based on this background, this article discussed the relationship between external innovation sources and innovation performance and how absorptive capacity affected this relationship.Firstly this article briefly introduced theoretical basis from three aspects, resource-based view, knowledge-based view and transaction cost theory, and reviewed and combed past literature related with open innovation, external innovation sources, absorptive capacity and innovation performance at home and abroad, and formed a preliminary research thought on this basis. Subsequently, drawing lessons from previous studies, this article explored the relationship between external innovation sources and innovation performance from three dimensions respectively, that is to say to explore the relationship between external innovation sources scale, relationship quality with external innovation sources, relationship stability with external innovation sources and innovation performance. Further, this paper introduced the concept of absorptive capacity and explored how it moderated the relationship discussed before, thus our conceptual model and research hypothesis formed through further refinement and extension. Finally.188samples collected from Shandong province. Guizhou province and Jiangsu province through questionnaires helped us to test the research hypotheses one by one.The main conclusions and management implications drawn from this article included:(1) the scale of external innovation sources, the relationship quality with external innovation source and the relationship stability with external innovation source relationship positively influence innovation performance. Thus enterprises can obtain more valuable and stable innovation resources and knowledge flow through establishing more collaborations with external innovation sources, maintaining high quality relationship with them, and keeping a long relationship with them, so as to improve innovation performance.(2) the potential absorptive capacity and realized absorptive capacity positively moderated the relationship between external innovation sources and innovation performance; Potential absorptive capacity and realized absorptive capacity jointly moderated the relationship between external innovation sources and innovation performance. Therefore, enterprises should improve its potential absorptive capacity and realized absorptive capacity based on the collaborations with external innovation sources, it will actively help enterprises to digest, convert and utilize innovation resources and knowledge obtained from external innovation sources. Improving absorptive capacity helped enterprises to dramatically improve innovation performance in the same condition of external innovation sources.