Can Enterprise Benefit From Ties With University?

With the accelerating growth of knowledge and the fierce competition in the market,enterprises have established cooperative relations with the University in order to obtain external complementary knowledge,improve the innovation ability of enterprises and form competitive advantage.But in practice,the ties with university is not always ideal and not all of the enterprises have chosen to cooperate with universities.Besides,these are some conflict in some empirical studies:Some researchers found out that ties with university improve the innovation,while the others found out that it cannot,and even hinder innovation.The inconsistency show that not all the enterprises can benefit from the ties with university.Then,some researcher found out that the relationship between the ties with university and innovation is moderated by the internal capability of the enterprise.So,the key is to identify the internal ability that affect the relationship between the ties with university and innovation.In order to research the complicated relationship between the ties with university and innovation,this paper introduces an internal important enterprise ability——Boundary-spanning search.This paper provides a new approach to account for the conflict relationship between ties with university and innovation by integrating innovation search theory.Through the theory and literature review,we find out boundary-spanning search can be subdivided into three different types of boundary-spanning search:technology,market and geography search.Therefore,this paper distinguishes these three different types of boundary-spanning search,and we argue that the relationship between ties with university and innovation is moderated by boundary-spanning search capability.Based on the review of the literature,we put forward the research hypothesis and theoretical model.Our samples based on 270 manufacturing firms from China,and the empirical findings suggest that firms' boundary-spanning search capability can moderate the relationship between ties with university and innovation.Specifically,the relationship will be strengthened by geography search,and weakened by technology and market search.We also find out that the moderating role of technology search is stronger than market search.The conclusion has important implications for the theory and practice,and more researches are worthy studying based on our findings.