The Effects Of External Organizational Integration And Knowledge Acquisition On New Service Development Performance

With the ever-increasing of service industry and the improvement of status of service economy in national economy with a presence of “servitization of economy”, technology improvement and innovation in service industry is becoming prominent nowadays. At the same time, the intensification of market competition and diversification of customer demands shorten the life cycle of service. New service development devotes to improve existing service or create new service to meet customer demands, and help enterprises to acquire multiple interests.As members of social network, enterprises integrate variety of valuable resources, such as suppliers, customers, cooperative partners and so on, to break through the boundaries of their own resources, realize the speediness, pertinency and accuracy of new service development. In the above process, “knowledge-based service” facilitates enterprises to take advantage of internal and external complementary resources to shorten production period and reduce the costs of new service development. Excellent external organizational integration may make it possible for enterprises to acquire more resources, information and knowledge through external network, but it is not always tenable for them to have enough capability to absorb the knowledge. Therefore, it is necessary to take enterprises’ absorptive capacity into consideration.Based on the service science theory, social network theory and knowledge management theory, and reviewing the existed literatures on external organizational integration, knowledge acquisition and new service development performance, the paper in-depth explores the effects of external organization and knowledge acquisition on new service development performance, and investigates the role absorptive capacity plays in the mechanism. This research takes 247 service enterprises in Pearl River Delta for targets, and adopts empirical research to identify the following questions by large scale questionnaire survey:(1) External organizational integration has a distinct positive impact on its new service development performance;(2) External organizational integration has a distinct positive impact on knowledge acquisition;(3) Knowledge acquisition has a distinct positive impact on its new service development performance;(4) Knowledge acquisition plays a part intermediary role in the path from external organizational integration to new service development performance;(5) Enterprise absorptive capacity plays a regulatory role in the relationship between knowledge acquisition and its new service development performance. By exploring the topics above, the paper would investigate the relationships among external organizational integration, knowledge acquisition, absorptive capacity and new service development performance, and enrich the research on service science, especially new service development in China. Meanwhile, it is possible and feasible to help managers and their enterprises to improve new service development performance by external organizational integration and knowledge acquisition.