The Impact Of Open Innovation On Technological Innovation Performance

In the context of economic globalization,sustainable innovation is the key element toestablish firms' competitive advantage.Today,high-cost innovation,driven by closed innovation paradigm,has no longer followed the changing market demands and competitive market environment.With the rapid growth of the global economy,how to improve firms' technological innovation capability and innovation efficiency has become the critical issue of maintaining sustainable economic development.Thus,as a new innovation paradigm,open innovation facilitates firms to conquer their disadvantages and explore external valuable sources to enhance their innovation performance.However,existing studies pay mainly their attention on the relationship between inbound open innovation and technological innovation performance,and pay little attention on the effect of outbound open innovation and the comprehensive effect of the two aspects of open innovation.In an open innovation paradigm,the way of effectively exploiting the two-way open innovation strategies is essential for firms' further survival and development.For the rapid improvement of firms' innovation performance,scholars mainly take the technologies transfer as study perspective.Thus,the structural characteristics of innovation network have been regarded as a general concern of research perspective.However,existing research rarely incorporates open innovation and network structure into the same framework to probe the influential factors of technological innovation performance.Based on the theories of open innovation,technological innovation performance and network structure,this study aims to explore the impact of open innovation on firms' technological innovation performance and the interactive impact between open innovation and network structure on firms' technological innovation performance.Further,this paper constructs a conceptual model which constitutes the main effect of open innovation on technological innovation performance and the moderation effect of network structure.This study takes 3D printing,Virtual Reality(VR),hybrid electric vehicle,mobile video and UAV as research objects,and collects the data of patent citation between 278 patentees in 2000-2015.Further,this study uses the tools of UCINET 6.0 and SPSS 20.0 to execute network analysis and hierarchical regression analysis to test the hypothesis in the model for exploring the relationship between open innovation and technological innovation performance.Based on the empirical analysis,this paper reaches the following conclusions: First,open innovation directly impacts firms' technological innovation performance.Both inbound open innovation and outbound open innovation have positive impact on firms' technological innovation performance.Additionally,outbound open innovation strengthens the relationship between inbound open innovation and technological innovation performance.Network structure has a moderating impact on the relationship between open innovation and technological innovation performance.Network cohesion has a negative moderating impact on the relationship between open innovation and technological innovation performance.Network centrality positively moderates the relationship between open innovation and technological innovation performance.Network heterogeneity has a negative moderating effect on the relationship between inbound open innovation and technological innovation performance.This study mainly analyzes the way of which firms take advantage of network structure to maximize the strategic value of open innovation.Also,this study aims to guide firms to properly use their strategies of inbound and outbound open innovation,and fully exploit the correspondent external network environment to achieve sustainable development.