An Empirical Study Of Exploratory Innovation、exploitative Innovation And New Product Development Performance----the Moderatingeffect Of Environmental Dynamism

As an important part of the strategic management process, new product development is the main source of organizational short-term financial performance and sustainable competitive advantage. So during the development of new products, organizations need to have two innovation capabilities simultaneously:on one hand, they need to make full use of existing capacity to develop existing products and services to meet the needs of existing markets and to achieve the basic profits for surviving (exploitative innovation); on the other hand, they need to explore new ideas or methods to adapt to environmental changes, and launch new products and services for emerging market, thus ensuring organizational long-term development (exploratory innovation). Organizations must complete two different kinds of innovational activities at the same time, in order to meet customer needs and to ensure that enterprises remain invincible. Therefore, two different innovation capabilities have played an important role in business operation. Meanwhile, as the rapid development of technology and the globalization of economics, changes in consumer demand and technology make organizations’survival environment becomes increasingly complex and more unpredictable. So it is worthy to discuss and analyze how to use two innovative capabilities to improve the new product development performance in a dynamic environment. In academia, the scholars have different views about the relationship between organizational innovation capability and organizational performance; Secondly, they mainly focus on the organization’s non-innovational performance, such as financial performance, and the thirdly, due to different countries have different market environments, different cultures, different economic development trends; they will influence the theoretic application and performance of innovation management. Therefore, exploratory innovation and exploitative innovation have various performances in different contexts. According to the above three points, following on the extended resource-based view, the fit-as-moderation view of contingency theory and the determinism and management view of the environmental-performance relationship, we are adding to the body of knowledge on exploration/exploitation through investigating a model that explicitly considers the main effects of exploratory/exploitative innovation to new product development performance and the moderating effects of environmental dynamism. The paper is based on a questionnaire survey/analysis of a simple of374firms from medical device industry in china which has a distinct characteristic of transitional economy. Empirical findings show that both exploratory innovation and exploitative innovation have a positive relationship with new product development performance; and environmental dynamism positively moderates the relationship between exploratory innovation and new product development performance, but our empirical data does not support for the negative moderating effect of environmental dynamics to exploitative innovation, so there is a need for future research to continue to explore this moderating effect form theoretic and empirical field. Our study helps the management recognize the survival environment factors and make the right decision of internal and external resource in order to balance exploitative and exploratory innovation and form core competence.