The Impact Of Partner Organization Heterogeneity On Innovation Performance In Open Innovation

Since the concept of "open innovation" was proposed, scholars have done much work on this research field. In open innovation, the most immediate decisions companies will face when implementing open innovation strategy is how to select partners to improve innovation performance. Existing literatures about open innovation have talked about openness, difference innovation sources and the heterogeneity of external partners, but few scholars have analyzed in depth the difference of external partners’ organization, namely partner organization heterogeneity, and its relationship with innovation performance.Based on the resource-based view, knowledge-based view and organizational learning theory, we center our research on the core issue of "The relationship between the partner organization heterogeneity and innovation performance". Specifically, our research explores the following questions from the shallower to the deeper::(1) we analyze the definition and connotation of partner organization heterogeneity in depth and propose the concept "the weight of organization heterogeneity " to analyze te organizaiton differences between different types of partners;(2)based on the improved measuring method of organization heterogeneity, analyze the relationship between partner organization heterogeneity and innovation performance;(3)how can industry technological environment such as technological regime influences the relationship between partner organization heterogeneity and innovation performance.Based on the literature review, this study posit a research model and hypotheses after summarizing the development and research condition of partner heterogeneity in open innovation and in-depth analyzing the content of partner organization heterogeneous content. Thereafter, using a quantitative and qualitative research methods, this paper carried out an empirical study based on a large-scale questionnaire survey and date analysis to validate the theoretical framework and further explore the relationship between variables.The result shows that there is a positive correlation between the partner organizations heterogeneity and enterprises’ innovation performance. Further technological regime can influence the relationship between them. When the technological opportunity is high, the positive correlation between them is more significantly than when the technological opportunity is low. When the technological cumulativeness is low, the positive correlation between them is more significantly than when the technological cumulativeness is high. The result suggest that industry technological environmental can affect the enterprises open innovation performance.