A Study Of The Impact Of Network Technological Diversity And Network Structure On Exploratory Innovation

As the technical complexity, the uncertainty and integration of technological innovation increasing, enterprises are difficult to achieve effective technology innovation and sufficient market competitiveness solely by their own technology and capital resources. More and more enterprises try to establish collaborative R&D networks with enterprises, universities, research institutions and other organizations through informal or formal forms, to achieve the purposes of resource sharing, capacity complementation, improvement of technological innovation and competitiveness.Based on Social Network Theory and Technological Innovation Theory, this paper attempts to incorporate network technological diversity, network structure and exploratory innovation into the same research framework, analyzes how technological diversity of collaborative R&D network affect exploratory innovation, and selects three network structure characteristic variables, the network density, the network tie strength and the network centrality, investigates the moderating role of network structure characteristics to the relationship between network technological diversity and exploratory innovation, in order to provide a reference for enterprises to build collaborative R&D networks and carry out exploratory innovation. This paper takes China's auto industry as the research object, and downloads patent data of auto companies from 2000 to 2011 in the Key Industries Patent Information Services Platform, identifies the mutual partnership and constructs collaborative R&D networks according to the cooperative act of patent application between firms, and carries out empirical test on the hypothesis through a negative binomial regression model.The results indicate that network technological diversity has a positive and significant effect on exploratory innovation; network density and network tie strength have a positive moderating effect on the relationship between network technological diversity and exploratory innovation whereas the moderating role of network centrality is not significant. This study not only makes up for the shortcomings of domestic academic research on network technology diversity, and extends the exploratory innovation theory, providing a new perspective for the study of network structure, but also provides guidance for China's auto industry how to carry out exploratory innovation, enhance independent innovation capability and international competitiveness, and achieve industrial upgrading and transformation.