The Impact Of Inter-firm Trust On Ambidextrous Innovation

China is a typical relational society in which the idea of relationship being equal to productivity is popular. Enterprises in market consider it as their guideline to build good relationships with others, and invest enormous labor, resource and money hoping that can help them strengthen, maintain and develop these ties. Actually many researches in some areas, like network ties, relational partners, strategic alliances, all treat “trust” as a core variable of getting innovation capability from inter-organizational relationship. Researchers also remind us of not overlooking the trust's informal maintenance mechanism when you do some research work on how inter-organizational collaboration influences innovative performance. But it's uncertain whether relational network based on “trust”, which companies spend vast resources on it, can bring ambidextrous innovation.On the basis of knowledge-based view, the essence of innovation is accumulation and use of knowledge. Inter-organizational trust can bring different knowledge to meet ambidextrous innovation's needs. But it's worth to be studied whether the knowledge can promote exploitative innovation and exploratory innovation simultaneously. After reviewing ambidextrous innovation, inter-organizational trust, market orientation, resource slack and human capital, this paper constructs the theoretical model and makes assumptions. Based on 115 enterprises from 60 high-growing industries in Hubei province, this study researches the relationship between inter-organizational trust and ambidextrous innovation, meanwhile moderating effects of MA(market orientation), RS(resource slack), HC(human capital)on it by using Stata and AMOS. And the results show that inter-organizational trust does not significantly affect ambidextrous innovation, but it can be significantly positive when market orientation, resource slack and human capital is high than low. Finally, this study suggests that when putting much attention to establish, sustain trustful relational network, enterprises can realize ambidextrous innovation by reserving resources, attracting employees and implementing effective market orientation.