Research On The Influence Mechanism Of Inventors' Collaboration Network On Firm's Exploratory Innovation

In the age of new economy,there is no doubt that innovation has become an important impetus for firms to achieve and sustain competitive advantage,as well as corporate profits.Through learning and applying new technology,exploratory innovation is an effective way for firms to modify the current technology and realize transformation and upgrading.Existing study indicates that the collaboration network and knowledge elements network which enterprise embedded in are the virtual sources of exploratory innovation.The collaboration network embeddedness characteristics reflect enterprise's social capital,while the knowledge elements network embeddedness characteristics reflect enterprise's knowledge capital.The functional mechanisms of two networks are different.So what is the joint effect of the two kinds of innovation networks to firm's exploratory innovation? And what is the interactive mechanism of the two kinds of innovation networks?Based on the new blending perspective of resource-based theory and social network theory,this thesis constructs a research framework in which includes knowledge elements network,collaboration network and firm's exploratory innovation.We use inventors' collaboration network as a host variable,in order to analyze the impacts of collaboration network embeddedness characteristics on firm's exploratory innovation.Besides,we use knowledge elements network as a moderator variable to investigate the interactive mechanism of knowledge elements network and collaboration network.To construct our measure of firm's network embeddedness characteristics,we choose two indicators: network structural hole and network centrality.Through exploring the relationship between innovation network and firms' exploratory innovations,we hope to provide a reference for the construction of firm's innovation network.Empirical research on the patent data in the nanotechnology field of the USPTO database indicates: there is a positive relationship between structure hole of a collaboration network and exploratory innovation.While average centrality of a firm's inventors in a collaboration network and its exploratory innovation shows an inverted U relationship.Structural hole of a knowledge elements network strengthens the positive relationship between a collaboration network and exploratory innovation,and it weakens the inverted U relationship between centrality of collaboration network and exploratory innovation.Centrality of a knowledge elements network weakens the positive relationship between structural hole of a collaboration network and exploratory innovation,while the moderation effect of centrality of a knowledge elements network between centrality of a collaboration network and exploratory innovation is not supported.