| Under the background of the implementation of the innovation-driven development strategy,the number of invention patent applications in China has ranked first all over the world for many years.However,behind the rapid growth of patents,China faces the problem that the technology and economic values of patents are generally low,and the number of radical inventions that leading to innovation is too small,which seriously restricts Chinese enterprises from participating in global technology and market competition.Compared with the incremental technology invention,the radical invention is considered to be the basis for creating a new technology trajectory and a technical economic paradigm.It has a subversive effect on existing technologies and products,and can provide a great opportunity for China to get rid of technology dependence and achieve technological leapfrogging.The academic community widely believes that technological inventions are the result of searching and recombining existing knowledge,and how to conduct knowledge search and recombination to produce breakthrough technological inventions has become a hot issue of academic concern.In view of the fact that most of the existing researches focus on the attribute characteristics of knowledge elements and neglect the interaction between knowledge level and inventor level features,this dissertation integrates the knowledge recombinant search view,social network theory and team learning theory to examine the two dimensions of the attributes and relational characteristics of knowledge elements.Specifically,this dissertation investigates the impacts of the attribute characteristics of knowledge combination(diversity and dissimilarity),the relational characteristics of knowledge combination network(centrality and structural hole),and their interaction on the creation of breakthrough technological inventions.On this basis,this thesis considers both the knowledge level feature and the inventor level feature,and theoretically clarifies the moderating role of inventor team size on relationship between the knowledge combination attribute characteristics(diversity and dissimilarity),knowledge combination network characteristics(centrality and structural hole)and the breakthrough technology inventions and propose corresponding research hypotheses,so as to systematically reveal what kind of knowledge combination activities that different inventors team engaged in is more likely to create breakthrough technological inventions.Then,this thesis takes the most rapid and influential nanotechnology in the world as the research object,and takes the invention patent of nanotechnology field granted by the USPTO in 1995-2010 as research sample.Then,the knowledge combination characteristics in the creation of radical invention and the moderating effect of the inventor team size are empirically tested.The results show that:(1)the level of diversity and dissimilarity of knowledge combination has a significant positive impact on the formation of radical invention,while the average centrality and average structural holes of knowledge combination have a significant negative effect on the formation of radical invention.At the same time,the knowledge structure average centrality and knowledge combination dissimilarity have a significant positive interaction effect on the formation of breakthrough technology invention.(2)The inventor team size has a significant positive moderating effect on the relationship between the level of knowledge combination diversity and the formation of radical invention,and has a significant negative effect on the relationship between the knowledge average structure hole and the formation of radical invention.This thesis clarifies the knowledge combination characteristics of radical invention from both the attributes and relational perspective of knowledge element,and reveals the difference in the role of different inventor team size in the knowledge combination of radical invention,thus enriching and deepening our understanding of the formation mechanism of radical invention.At the same time,from the knowledge level and the inventor level,the thesis has important implications for firms to implement knowledge combination strategy in creating radical invention. |
