A Study On Relationship Among Enterprise Social Capital, Technical Knowledge Acquisition And Product Innovation Performance

In the context of open innovation, the integration of industrialization, teaching and research has become a trend. With the continuous change of the market demand, enterprises solely relying on their internal resources cannot meet the needs of innovation, and the effective utilization of external resources become the key factors in influencing the result of enterprise’s innovation. Under this circumstance, how do enterprises use the social capital built with and universities or research institutions has great influence on enterprise’s technical knowledge acquisition and technological innovation promotion. Based on this background, this paper studies the impact of social capital on technical knowledge acquisition and product innovation performance.Based on social capital theory and innovation theory, and combined with the management practice of Industry-Academy-Research cooperation in our country, we construct the theory model about the impact of various dimensions of enterprise social capital on technical knowledge acquisition and product innovation performance, and put forward the corresponding theoretical assumptions. Then, we conduct a questionnaire survey on Beijing’s knowledge-intensive firms in high technology industry, and process the 151 sample data obtained using the method of factor analysis and multiple linear regression analysis, and then verify our theoretical model.The research results show that:(1) The influence factor of explicit technical knowledge acquisition and tacit technical knowledge acquisition are different. Relation number, relation intensity, and shared goals have significantly positive effect on explicit technical knowledge acquisition. Relation intensity, trust and shared goals have significantly positive effect on tacit knowledge acquisition. (2) Both explicit and tacit technical knowledge acquisition have positive effect on technical innovation capability. (3) Technical innovation capability and tacit technical knowledge acquisition have positive effect on product innovation performance, but explicit technical knowledge acquisition has no significant effect on product innovation performance.This paper studies the impact of social capital on innovation performance from the perspective of technical knowledge acquisition, the research results not only enrich the theory of social capital, but also enlighten the enterprises in Industry-Academy-Research cooperation. Base on our research results, we propose that enterprises which are product innovation oriented should focus on tacit technical knowledge acquisition, and should strengthen relation intensity, trust and shared goals to promote tacit technical knowledge acquisition as thus to promote product innovation performance.