Individual Level Knowledge Innovation Efficiency In The New Product Development Process Affect The Mechanism

In the Age of the Knowledge Economy, knowledge innovation is the major source of long-term competitive advantage for the high-tech enterprises. After the review of the previous relevant literatures, we could find that the scholars got different conclusions about the relationship about team-members-proximity and knowledge innovation. The knowledge obtained in the course of transmission of knowledge is the basis of personal knowledge creation. Thus knowledge innovation can be divided into two types of activities: knowledge creation and knowledge dissemination.Focused on the R&D team members in IT companies, the research is about the following issues: Firstly, to explore mechanism between the proximity of individual team members and knowledge innovation level, and clarify the way of the system and mechanism; Secondly, to test whether the trust is a mediating factor in the mechanism between proximity and knowledge innovation; Thirdly, to test how the knowledge tacitness moderates the mechanism between proximity and knowledge innovation. The results of this study confirm the basic hypotheses, the main conclusions are:(1) The proximity of the team members has significant impact on the efficiency of knowledge innovation. Physical proximity, personality and background knowledge similarity have significant positive effects for knowledge transfer efficiency. The proximity of conscientiousness is the most affecting factor for knowledge dissemination. The proximity of background knowledge has the minimum effect for knowledge dissemination. In the mechanism of the efficiency of knowledge creation, knowledge transfer is used as a control variable. Only the physical and openness proximity have significant impacts for knowledge experience creation.(2) The trust factor plays a mediating role in the relationship between the proximity and knowledge dissemination. The higher the proximity between the team members, the more they accept each other. So the trust between them will be better. Then the sharing will and motivation get stronger, the sense of inequity reduced and learning attitude becomes more positive for both parties in the communication. Thus it will improve the quality of communication and the efficiency of knowledge dissemination.(3) The knowledge tacitness moderates the relationship between proximity and knowledge innovation efficiency positively. In the relationship between the proximity and knowledge dissemination, tacit knowledge enhances the relationship between physical proximity and the efficiency of knowledge dissemination. It is also true forthe knowledge background similarity. As for the correlation between proximity and knowledge creation, implicit knowledge could enhance the relationship between personality similar and knowledge creation efficiency. The different mechanisms of knowledge transfer and knowledge creation result in this moderating difference.