The Empirical Study Of Effects Of Firm-Star Organization Relationship Breadth On Product Innovation Performance

Embedded technology standardization network is an important way for firms to obtain external resources and promote product innovation.But it will also bring two major challenges to embedded firms: knowledge integration difficulty and high opportunistic risk.This study attempts to analyze how firms deal with these challenges to improve product innovation performance from the perspective of specific partnership(that is,the cooperative relationship between firm and star organizations).Integrating relational capital theory,knowledge-based theory and institutional theory,based on the distinction between star organizations and non-star organizations in technology standardization network,this paper studies the impact of firm-star organization relationship breadth on product innovation performance,as well as the moderating role of technological diversification and marketization.We select 154 vehicle manufacturing firms in China as the research sample,uses UCINET 6.0 to construct the technology standardization network of automobile industry,and uses Stata 15.0 to test research hypotheses.The regression results show that: firm-star organization relationship breadth has a linear and positive effect on radical product innovation performance,and a nonlinear and diminishing marginal effect on incremental product innovation performance.Technological diversification negatively moderates the positive correlation between firm-star organization relationship breadth and radical product innovation performance;while its moderating effect on the correlation between firm-star organization relationship breadth and incremental product innovation performance is not significant;Marketization positively moderates the positive correlation between firm-star organization relationship breadth and radical product innovation performance;And it weakens the diminishing marginal effect of firm-star organization relationship breadth on incremental product innovation.The research results have both theoretical and practical significance.At the theoretical level,this paper clarifies the impact of firm-star organization relationship breadth on different types of product innovation performance,and provides an important boundary condition supplement by introducing the characteristics of firm’s knowledge base and institutional environment to understanding the relationship between focal firms and specific partners and its impact;At the practical level,the conclusions of this paper provide policy suggestions for guiding manufacturing firms how to construct and manage technology standardization network relations to promote product innovation.