Organization Of Resources Between Research, The Mechanism Of Action Of The Innovation Performance

The advance of globalization has deeply changed the form of competition between firms and the resource base of firms.The new economy is characterized by globalization,intellectual resources and collaborating.Across global markets,the competition between atom firms is giving way to the competition between groups or networks.Under this context,the alliances and networks which the firms embedded in provide new resources,knowledge and capabilities to them and further promoted the value creation process of firms.At the same time,the forming and development of global manufacturing network(GMN) opened an opportunity window for Chinese domestic firm to integrate into global "coopetition" networks and accumulate new resources and enhance capabilities.How to integrate the resources embedded in the networks and enhance innovation capability is the key issue for domestic firms to upgrade in the global value chain and acquire competitive advanteges.Hence,inter-organizational resources draw the attention of many academics and become a core concept in understanding the strategic behavior and performance of inter-connected firms.However,ten years past since Gulati first introduced the concept of "network resource",the construct and the taxonomy of this construct are still unclear.Further,few researches has explored the mechanism of inter-organizational resources on firm performance.Under this context,this dissertation integrates resource-based view,social network theory,technological innovation theory and organizational learning theory and tries to answer the core question of "How do inter-organizational resources affect firm innovation performance?" To meet this object,this thesis built taxonomy of inter-organizational resources,examined the effects of inter-organizational reources on firm innovation performance,and investigated the mechanism within the black box between inter-organizational networks and firm innovation performance.The form of investigation in this dissertation involved both quantitative and qualitative methods and the main work is done through the following four stages:In the first stage,we reviewed the literature in resource-based theory,social network theory,technological innovation theory and organizational learning theory and put forward the construct of inter-organizational resources in the context of network environments.In the second stage,4 explorative case studies were taken out to verify the construct and get the initial concept model of the mechanism of inter-organizational resources on innovation performance.In the third stage,the concept model was built based on in-depth theoretical analysis and the hypotheses were tested using a sample of 208 firms engaging in global manufacturing networks.The results showed that inter-organizational resources play an ever important role in the competitive advantage of firms. In the fourth stage,the evolutional process of inter-organizational resources was approached and the main factors influencing inter-organizational resources were investigated.After such exploring and testing processes,following conclusions can be reached:(1) Firm's inter-organizational resources have an overall positive impact on firm innovation performance.Inter-organizational resources are the resources firms tap into or created in the inter-organizational networks,through leveraging these resources, firms can enhance their innovation performance.(2) Inter-organizational resources influence innovation performance partly through the mediating role of technological capability and relative bargaining power. The empirical results suggest that inter-organizational resources promote innovation performance through three distinct ways:inter-organizational resources can affect the innovation performance directly,inter-organizational resources enhance the technological capability and technological capability improve innovation performance, at the same time,inter-organizational resource have an influence on firm's relative bargaining power and relative bargaining power will has a positive effect on firm innovation performance.(3) Relational governance mode and industry technological opportunity play a moderating role in the relationship of inter-organizational resources and firm innovation performance.In detail,in equity based relationships,knowledge sharing routines and joint problem solving routines greatly facilitates the technological capability;in contract based relationships,it is relation specific resources and complementary resources that firm accessed in the relationships play more important roles.When industry has more technological opportunities,the inter-organizational resources will have more significant influence on innovation performance.(4) Inter-organizational resources are formed gradually and evolutionarily and they are influenced by firm's absorptive capability,partner's resources endowments and relational characteristics.Inter-organizational resources are built with the development of inter-organizational relationships and have a path-dependent trait.By employing an integrative,multidisciplinary approach,this dissertation tries to make some innovation in the following fields:First,this dissertation refined the construct of inter-organizational resources and built taxonomy of inter-organizational resources,through this it extended research on the inter-organizational relationship and network strategy.It integrated and extended the resource-based view and social economic theory and put forward that inter-organizational resources can be divided into to "accessed resources" and "embedded resources" and further into four factors:relation specific resources, complementary resources,knowledge sharing routines and joint problem solving routines.The validity of this construct was verified by explorative case studies, explorative factor analysis and confirmative factor analysis.Hence,it contributed to growing research on resource-based view,especially the resource-based view in the network environment.Second,this dissertation explored the mechanism of inter-organizational resources,which uncovered the nature of the process of global manufacturing network on firm's competitive advantage.From the point of value creation,accessed resources directly enhanced innovation performance and embedded resources facilitate the technological capability and hence enhanced innovation performance.From the point of value capturing;excess use of accessed resources will cause dependency on multinational firms and reduce the proportion of value appreciated by the focal firm. It linked inter-organizational resources with innovation performance through the mediating role of technological capability and relative bargaining power and increased our understanding of the competitive advantage of interconnected firms in global manufacturing networks.Third,this dissertation investigated the dynamic evolutionary process of inter-organizational resources and identified the three main factors that have influence on the inter-organizational resources.Through empirical statistics it was found that inter-organizational resources evolved gradually with the inter-organizational relationship and provided some advice to accumulate and manage inter-organizational resources efficiently.For the restriction of time,data and ability of authour,there are still some limitations in this dissertation.Further work is needed to incorporate more dynamic perspectives and the entire influence of direct and indirect ties in the network.