Capability Construction And Relationship Adaptation: An Empirical Research For High-tech SMEs In Network Growth

The high-tech SMEs now have become a very important part among China’s SMEs, and are playing a pivotal role in China’s economic structure. While maintaining rapid development, high-tech SMEs tend to grow in the collective network pattern instead of general atomic pattern, which means the issue of network growth is not the same as that of individual growth in atomic pattern. At present, most studies conducted within the scope of networked growth for high-tech SMEs focus on network power, network structure and network rigidity while there are only a few scholars underlining the importance of relationship adaptation. The relationship adaptation process plays a significant role when high-tech SMEs try to break network rigidity or to obtain heterogeneous resources. Based on the research at home and abroad for enterprise capability to analyze enterprise capability and then build up enterprise capability is the key to the growth of high-tech SMEs embed network. However, when initially integrated in social network or facing complicated network dynamic, high-tech SMEs will inevitably encounter some obstacle in the process of adaptation. So relationship adaptation is the key factor to the growth of high-tech SMEs in network growth. This article then analyzes growth of high-tech SEMs from the perspective of enterprise capability, relationship adaptation and network growth. Enterprise capability can be divided into opportunity recognition capability, resources integration capability and technology innovation capability. Relationship adaptation can be divided into assimilating adaptation and differentiating adaptation. Based on above mentioned elements, this article will work out the affects that enterprise capability and relationship adaptation have on network growth. This article uses questionnaire survey to obtain the data and then conduct descriptive statistics analysis, correlation analysis and regression analysis based on the data in hand to finally draw the conclusion that enterprise capability have significant positive impact on enterprise network growth and relationship adaptation plays an intermediary role between enterprise capability and network growth. This study, defines relationship adaptation as an intermediary to conduct network growth, not only provides a new angle and enlightenment to the enterprise network growth but more importantly offers a feasible strategy to large amount of China’s high-tech SMEs, which are suffering from resources barriers.