Research On The Relationship Of Network Embeddednes, Knowledge Absorptive Capacity And Innovation Performance

How to obtain and maintain competitive advantage is the main concern in the field ofmanagement. Innovation is an important support to achieve this goal. With the innovativecomplexity and uncertainty increasing, that the companies only obtain information andknowledge from their internal is not enough. The value chain of innovation activities can notbe finish in this situation."Work behind closed doors" will obviously not be able to to adapttoday’s era. Companies have to seek cooperation in various stages of the innovation.Therefore, the modern model of innovation has undergone a change, which is innovation is nolonger a simple atomic process, but the cooperation of an interactive process and a continuousprocess of formation of networks of enterprise cooperation and innovation. In addition, in therapid market of unpredictable competitive landscape, the dynamic capability is the key tomaintain a competitive advantage. Knowledge absorptive capacity belongs to the scope ofdynamic capabilities. Based on the concept of internal, scholars do not agree with the networktheory, which has emphasized the impact too much on external linkages to innovation, andignored the series of process knowledge acquisition, assimilation, tranform and application.Scholars of internal capacity believe that enterprises’ knowledge absorptive capacity aredifferent, which leads to the different innovation performances. Nowadays, teamwork modelis more and more popular in this era of knowledge-based economy.Therefore, based on the literature review of network embeddedness, knowledgeabsorptive capacity and innovation performance studied by many scholars home and abroad,this paper deeply analyzed the relationships between network embeddedness (includingrelational embeddedness and structural embeddedness), knowledge absorptive capacity andinnovation performance. In order to verify theoretical assumptions provided in this paper,questionnaire is used and statistic tools such as SPSS18.0and AMOS7.0are used to analyzedata. The paper proposes a Structural Equation Model（SEM）which consists of networkembeddedness, knowledge absorptive capacity and innocation performance, and empiricallytests the model with data from a questionnaire. Hypothesizes are proved by the pathsrelationship test in the model.The conclusion shows that:(1)Network embeddedness has a positive impact oninnovation performance.(2)Network embeddedness has a positive impact on knowledgeabsorptive capacity.(3)Knowledge absorptive capacity has a positive impact on innovationperformance.(4)Knowledge absorptive capacity is the intermediate variable in the path of network embeddedness on innovation performance. On the premise that relationalembeddedness and structural embeddedness are related, the results of analysis also proved:①Knowledge absorptive capacity is not the intermediate variable in the path of relationalembeddedness on innovation performance.②Knowledge absorptive capacity is the completeintermediate variable in the path of structural embeddedness on innovation performance.