The Impact Of External Innovation Sources On Innovation Performance

Small medium-sized enterprises(SMEs),the pillar of national economy,play an important role in boosting the employment,the economy and the industries development at both domestic and global levels.However,most of them cannot survive in the fierce competition due to their lacking in innovation ability.Since the beginning of the 21 st century,innovation have evolved from being the artefact of an individual or internal process within firms to an interactive process between firms and/or in collaboration with knowledge-creating institutions.The open innovation model suggests that firms should purposively use the inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate innovation and to expand the markets for use of innovation.And open innovation has become the hottest topic in the field of innovation management,but the existing researches often take the multinational enterprises as their objects.The empirical research about open innovation of SMEs is still lacking.This study whose research object is the SMEs aims to explore the direct and indirect effects of external innovation sources on the firms' innovation performance.Furthermore,the absorptive capacity was used to testify the moderating effects between external innovation sources and absorptive capacity.Survey results of 252 SMEs in Pearl River Delta region provide support for most hypotheses.The result shows that the external innovation sources of SMEs,including users,competitors,university/research institutions,government and intermediary service organizations,has a positive relationship with innovation performance.Both potential absorptive capacity and realized absorptive capacity moderate the relationship between the external innovation sources and absorptive capacity at various degree.And the moderating effect of realized absorptive capacity is obviously stronger than potential absorptive capacity.Thus,when interacting and collaborating with external innovation sources,SMEs not only pay attention to improving the potential absorptive capacity,but also to improving the realized absorptive capacity.After acquiring knowledge from outside,SMEs should learn to assimilate it into the innovation products and services to promote the firm's innovation performance.