Research On Network Embeddedness,External Knowledge Search And Enterprise’s Innovation Performance

Under the background of economic globalization gradually,the rapid iteration of customer requirements,continuous upgrading of technical structure,the system of the changing situations,and the increasingly fierce market competition for all kinds of enterprises are faced with the external environment more and more unstable,uncertainty,complexity,fuzziness characteristics,which makes the enterprise internal resources to maintain innovation alone has become increasingly difficult.In order to break through situational constraints,some enterprises focus on their own development strategies and actively embed in the external network to obtain ideas,knowledge and other resources to help enterprises achieve innovative development.For example,industrial cluster,strategic alliance and innovation alliance have become common forms for modern enterprises to effectively "embed" the external network of the organization to obtain resources,which also makes the relationship between network embeddedness and technological innovation become one of the hot topics in the field of strategic management under the background of open innovation.In view of the above problems,scholars have discussed the relational characteristics of firm embeddedness and the direct impact of structural characteristics on its innovation from the perspective of strong and weak connection and structure view,and there are paradoxes in the research results.Some scholars try to explain this phenomenon by studying the influencing mechanism between the two.The mediating factors studied mostly include internal ability factors such as knowledge absorption and knowledge integration,which are relatively single.In addition,under the background of open innovation,knowledge search has become an effective way for enterprises to enrich their internal knowledge base,and under the guidance of mass entrepreneurship and innovation,relevant researches on exploitative knowledge search and exploratory knowledge search need to be further deepened.At the same time,the knowledge base view holds that the knowledge base of an enterprise is still the core factor that determines the enterprise performance.Based on the above phenomenon,this study takes external binary knowledge search as a mediator variable and introduces enterprise knowledge base as a situational variable to further explore the mechanism of network embeddedness and innovation performance.Based on empirical research,this paper mainly draws the following conclusions:(1)both relational embeddedness and structural embeddedness positively affect innovation performance and external knowledge search(including exploitative external knowledge search and exploratory external knowledge search).(3)Both exploitative knowledge search and exploratory knowledge search have positive effects on firm innovation performance.(4)Both exploitative knowledge search and exploratory knowledge search play a partially mediating role in the relationship between relational embeddedness and structural embeddedness and innovation performance.(5)The moderating effect of knowledge base on exploitative knowledge search and innovation performance is not significant;Firm knowledge base plays a positive moderating role in the relationship between exploratory knowledge search and firm innovation performance.(6)The two dimensions of network embeddedness positively moderated by the firm’s knowledge base influence the mediating role of innovation performance through exploratory knowledge search.However,the mediating effect of enterprise knowledge base on network embeddedness through exploitative knowledge search on innovation performance is insignificant.According to the conclusion of this study,the following management suggestions are put forward: First,enterprises should pay attention to the relationship management with external networks,and build and maintain the coexistence of "quantity" and "quality" social network;Secondly,according to the demand of innovation,enterprises should actively carry out dual knowledge search to acquire valuable knowledge brought by "embedding",expand the existing knowledge capacity of enterprises,so as to become the "source" to support innovation and improve performance.Thirdly,the accumulated knowledge base of enterprises is still the key core resources in the process of supporting enterprise innovation.Enterprises should constantly expand and adjust the knowledge base to achieve effective absorption and utilization of external knowledge resources.And when the knowledge base of the enterprise is strong enough,the intensity of exploratory knowledge search can be increased to make the novel resources brought by embedding more effectively transformed into the source of internal innovation vitality and performance improvement of the enterprise.