The Research On Relationships Of R&D Capability And Innovation Performance From The View Of Knowledge Boundary Spanning Of R&D Network

In recent years,China has vigorously promoted people to start their own businesses and to make innovations,aiming at promoting transformat ion and upgrading of Chinese economy.In particular,the recent increase and upgrade of the trade war between China and the United States has forced Chinese companies to carry out independent innovation,especially in core technologies.Nowadays various companies have invested a large amount of R&D to improve R&D capabilities and innovation performance.The relationship between R&D capability and innovation performance has a high degree of concern in both theoretical and practical circles.However,the relationship between R&D capability and innovation performance remains controversial.With various theories and different economic environments,existing literatures indicate different kinds of relationships between R&D capability and innovation performance.Moreover,different types of innovation performance represent different types and different degrees of innovation and support different innovation strategies.This article divides innovation performance into exploitation performance and exploration performance,and explores the impact of R&D capabilities on exploitation performance and exploration performance based on knowledge boundary spanning of R&D network.Setting the research background in China,this study draws on absorptive capacity,knowledge inertia and prospect theory to show the relationship between R&D capability and innovation performance which comprises exploitation and exploration.We propose that stronger R&D capability promotes exploitation performance but inhibits exploration performance.As exploitation represents immediate interest and exploration represents long-term interest,we introduce the notion of knowledge boundary spanning of R&D network to balance short-run and long-run benefits.The empirical results show that R&D capability an d knowledge boundary spanning of R&D network complement each other for explorative innovation while they present trade-offs for exploitative innovation.The research conclusions of this paper have reference significance for the theoretical research and management practice related to innovation.In theory,this article enriches the literature on the relationship between R&D capabilities and innovation performance,and innovatively studies the relationship between R&D capabilities and exploitation performance and the relationship between R&D capabilities and exploration performance from the perspective of knowledge boundary spanning of R&D network.