An Empirical Study On Firm’s Implicit Knowledge, Acquisition Absorptive Capacity And Innovation Performance

Since the1990s, the internet and communications technology as the core of theinformation revolution make the economic development of whole world step into anew era of knowledge economy. Currently, as the world economy continues toaccelerate the pace of integration, the macroeconomic environment of domesticmarket is worsened because of the influx of a large number of foreign enterprises;many enterprises are facing to unimagined pressure for operations. At the same time,many enterprises have realized that only continuous innovation can be able to achievesustainable development and maintain a dominant position in the fierce competition.However, innovation is based on knowledge, especially the implicit knowledge whichis not easy to encode and existed in every corner of enterprises. The implicitknowledge has become the source of core competitiveness of an enterprise; in order tomeet the market demand and obtain a good innovation performance, enterprises musthave a better acquisition, digestion, transformation, and utilization on implicitknowledge.Currently, research on implicit knowledge management has become a hotspotamong foreign academic circles, but the domestic research has just started, relevanttheoretical researches are relatively few. Therefore, this paper according to theoverview of the relevant researches of implicit knowledge acquisition, absorptivecapacity, innovation performance and other basic theories, taking domestic enterprisesas survey objects; we divided the implicit knowledge acquisition into skill-based andcognitive-based implicit knowledge acquisition, and considered the mediating effectsof absorptive capacity between implicit knowledge acquisition and innovationperformance. According to the theoretical model and underlying hypotheses, wedeveloped and demonstrated the questionnaire, using SPSS19.0and AMOS17.0forstatistical analysis and structural model testing to test hypotheses. We summarized theconclusions of this study and proposed relevant management revelation.After empirical test, we found:(1) Skill-based and cognitive-based implicitknowledge acquisition both have a direct significant positive impact on innovation performance;(2) Skill-based implicit knowledge acquisition has a direct significantpositive impact on potential absorptive capacity and realistic absorptive capacity;Cognitive-based implicit knowledge acquisition only has a direct significant positiveimpact on potential absorptive capacity;(3) Realistic absorptive capacity have a directsignificant positive impact on innovation performance;(4) Realistic absorptivecapacity play an intermediary role in the relationship between skill-based implicitknowledge acquisition and innovation performance; We also found that potentialabsorptive capacity have a direct significant positive impact on realistic absorptivecapacity, these two types absorptive capacity have a multiple intermediation effectsbetween implicit knowledge acquisition and innovation performance.