Regional Boundaries Of Firms' R&D Collaboration,Technology Diversification And Innovative Output

With the rapid development of technology and globalization,the competitive environment that firms have been facing is increasingly full of uncertainty and risk.Due to the limited abilities and the unlimited market demands,firms that based on its own knowledge alone can no longer meet the needs of innovative activities for money,technology,human resources and so on.Thus more and more firms have decided to innovate by collaboration.In the era of open innovation,the geographical attributes of partners have become increasingly prominent.It has become an important way to innovate for firms that conducting R&D collaboration across regional boundaries to get access to innovative resources.This thesis focuses on the impact of the regional boundaries of corporate R&D collaboration on innovative output,and identifies an internal contextual factor —— technology diversification that affects this procedure.Specifically,based on the perspective of regional boundaries,this thesis divides corporate R&D collaboration activities into three types: intra-regional R&D collaboration,inter-regional R&D collaboration and the balance between intra-and inter-regional R&D collaboration,then comprehensively measures the firms' innovative output performance from two dimensions: innovative output scale and innovative output quality.At the same time,this thesis systematically describes the mechanism of corporate R&D collaboration regional boundaries on innovative output,as well as the moderator effect of technology diversification.This thesis integrates the theoretical framework of open innovation,knowledge based view and binary innovation,and conducts an empirical study on listed companies in electric vehicle industry by fixed-effect panel negative binomial regression models.The results are shown below.Firstly,intra-and inter-regional R&D collaboration both have positive and significant impact on firms' innovative output.Specifically,intra-regional R&D collaboration promotes innovative quantity,because the knowledge in the same region is homogenous,which is beneficial for firms to conduct exploitative innovation;while inter-regional R&D collaboration promotes innovative quality,because the knowledge in different regions are heterogeneous,which is beneficial for firms to conduct explorative innovation.Secondly,the balance between intra-and inter-regional R&D collaboration is bad for firms' innovative output.The higher the degree of collaboration balance,the more obvious the phenomenon of high management costs and fierce competition for resources in firms,which is harmful to innovative output.Thirdly,the moderating effects of technology diversification are significantly negative.Technology diversification negatively moderates the relationship between intra-regional R&D collaboration and innovative output,and also negatively moderates the relationship between inter-regional R&D collaboration and innovative output.