The Impact Of Partner Collaborations In Standard Alliance On Enterprise Innovation Performance

With the development of informational technology and digital revolution,standards are playing increasingly important role in society.Participation in standard setting has become an important means for firms to establish core competitive advantages.Due to the increasing complexity of technology,firms tend to cooperate with external organizations to form a standard alliance for the purpose of developing standards.On the one hand,firms can choose to cooperate with public organizations such as universities and research institutions;on the other hand,they can also choose to cooperate with business organizations such as suppliers and competitors.How to management different combinations of partner collaborations in standard alliance is of great importance for firms to succeed in the fierce market competition.After reviewing relevant literature on standard alliance and innovation,this paper identifies business partner collaborations and public partner collaborations in standard alliance and regard them as competitive collaborations and non-competitive collaborations respectively.From the perspective of knowledge-based view,we explore how different combinations of partner collaborations in standard alliances influence the firm's innovation performance.Using panel data of 657 listed firms in the manufacturing industry from 2009 to 2017,the empirical results show a negative relationship between relative competitiveness(i.e.,the proportion of competitive collaborations between a firm and its partners in the standard alliances)and the firm's innovation performance.In addition,based on institutional theory,this paper takes account of the impact of institutional environment on firms' behaviors.Thus,this paper includes four institutional environmental elements(i.e.,state ownership,government subsidy,legal development and product market development)into analysis framework and discuss how institutional environment moderate the relationship between relative competitiveness in standard alliance and the firm's innovation performance.The empirical results show that at the firms' level,there is no significant difference in the negative relationship between relative competitiveness in standard alliances and the firms' innovation performance for SOEs and non-SOEs,while government subsidy weakens the negative relationship between relative competitiveness in standard alliances and the firms' innovation performance;at the regional level,legal development weakens the negative relationship between relative competitiveness in standard alliances and the firms' innovation performance,while product market development strengthens the negative relationship between relative competitiveness in standard alliances and the firms' innovation performance.Finally,based on the research results above,this paper provides some practical suggestions for firms on how to better manage partner collaborations in standard alliance so as to develop innovation activities.