Research On The Impact Of Enterprise Innovation Network And Interlocking Directorate Network On Innovation Performance

Under the background of open innovation,more and more companies conduct collaborative innovation through external social networks to reduce innovation costs and risks.Among them,both the innovation network and the interlock director network have an important influence on the corporate innovation.On one hand,enterprises obtain heterogeneous resources from other members through innovation networks,achieve and share complementary resources and information,and then promote the development of cooperative innovation.On the other hand,the interlock directors,as a common phenomenon in listed companies,have attracted scholars' attention gradually.The network formed by the interlock directors is called the interlock director network which is an important channel for enterprise to share resource and disseminate information.As the core decision-making department in the corporate governance structure,directorate can exert an important influence on enterprise's innovation strategies.Hence,how enterprises to obtain external network resources effectively in this situation and improve their innovation performance has become an important issue of enterprise innovation and management practices.Although many authors have focused on the relationship between social networks and firm innovation,few literatures took the impact of innovation network and interlock director network on corporate innovation into consideration simultaneously and discussed the interaction effect between the two networks.Therefore,this paper investigated the mechanism of the innovation network and interlock director network on the firm innovation performance based on the theory of social network and cooperative innovation.Based on the review and summary of the literature,we firstly defined the concepts of corporate innovation network and interlock director network,and then modified their interaction systematically.Next,the theoretical hypothesis model of the relationship among firm innovation network,interlock director network and innovation performance was constructed.Then,taking a total of 135 firms in the Shanghai city from 2014 to 2016 as the research sample,we used UCINET to calculate the network centrality and structure holes,and the SPSS was used for descriptive analysis,correlation analysis and multiple linear regression.Also,through empirical analysis,the impact of the interaction between the two networks on the firm innovation performance was identified.The results indicated that the firm innovation network centrality,interlock director network centrality and interlock director network structure hole all have an significant effect on the improvement of firm innovation performance.Especially,when the centrality and structural hole index values of interlock directors were higher,the innovation network had a greater positive effect on the firm innovation performance,which stated that the interlock directors can enhance the positive influence of innovation networks on firm innovation activities more effectively.Finally,we compared and summarized the results of our study and,in the last section,proposed relevant countermeasures to improve firms social network management.