Social Network And Enterprise Innovation Performance:The Mediating Role Of Innovation Legitimacy

With the rapid transition of technology, the impact of economic globalization, the government deregulation, the changing of customer preferences and the product life cycle shortened, companies are faced with a dynamic and complex business environment. Companies can only continue to innovate in order to obtain growth and development. Based on Chinese economic transition, social network as an important factor of innovation development has been noticed. But to achieve a business innovation not only depends on its own’s economic strengthes and business strategies, also depends on the innovation legitimacy that the degree of the innovation recognition from the social ethics, social values and cultural environment of its other systems. How use the reasonable approachs to get more legitimacy that are critical to the growth has been a focus of the reaserchers and companies. Therefore, integrated social network theory and the theory of innovation performance perspective, this study build a relational model of the social networks, innovation legitimacy and innovative performance. We use the empirical analysis to explore how social network affect the innovation performance in different innovation legitimacy.Based on 204 parts of the enterprise data, we use empirical analysis to test hypotheses. We got the follow results:(1)There is a positive correlation between social network and innovation performance;(2)there is a positive correlation between innovation regulation legitimacy and government network, but there is no significant positive correlation between innovation normative legitimacy, cognitive legitimacy and government network; there is a positive correlation between innovation normative legitimacy, cognitive legitimacy and the customer relationship network; but between regulation legitimacy and customer relationship network is not significant; there is a significant positive correlation between social relationship network and innovation legitimacy;(3) there is a positive correlation between innovation legitimacy and innovation performance.(4) The innovation regulatory legitimacy has a meidiating role between the government network, social network and innovation performance; the innovation normative intermediary has a mediating role between the of customer network, social realationship network and innovation performance; innovation cognitive legitimacy has a meidiating role between the customer network, social realationship network and innovation performance.The results show that social network play an important role in the process of enterprise development. The social network not only accesses resources, but also wines the support and trust of stakeholders, getting innovation legitimacy. Therefore, in order to improve enterprise’s innovation performance, we not only choose the right innovation projects but build different social networks that to enhance the innovation legitimacy.