A Study On The Impact Of Inter - Organizational Trust On The Performance Of Enterprise 's Technology Innovation: An Intermediary Perspective On The Acquisition Of Internet External Intellectual Capital

With the growing complexity of technology innovation and the deepening of knowledge division and cooperation between firms, the demand and dependence of firms on external resources have been increasing, which promoted the pattern of technology innovation to network-based innovation characterized by systemic integration, combination and openness, and the place of innovation is also being transferred from firm to network. Accordingly, only firms who achieve to effectively obtain external critical resources and improve the innovation performance by innovation network, would maintain sustainable competitive advantage. In the Era of knowledge economy, intellectual capital who can positively affect firms innovation capability,is the most important strategic resources,and some literature pointed out that intellectual capital could flow between organizations. Under the background of network-based innovation, how to obtain the intellectual capital from the outside thus becomes a critical problem to be solved. Furthermore, firms? Innovation activities with external resources are under the influence of relationship between network members, and trust is one of the core elements of network, but there is not enough discussion on how inter-organizational trust affecting outside intellectual capital acquisition, thereby affecting the mechanism of technology innovation performance, hence the paper took this as the core issues to discuss.Centered Around "inter-organizational trust ? external intellectual capital acquisition ? technology innovation performance", and based on innovation theory, firms network theory, social capital theory, resource-based views and the competence theory, the paper integrated theoretical and empirical analysis to carry out research; and on the basis of literature review, discussed the motivations and the ways to acquire external intellectual capital under innovation network situation, analyzed the relationships between inter-organizational trust, external intellectual capital acquisition, technology innovation performance and Dynamic capability, accordingly proposed hypotheses and built the conceptual model; then collected data including 381 samples to implement statistical analysis, and finally verified the hypotheses and revised the theoretical model. From perspective of external intellectual capital acquisition, this paper attempts to open the process ―black box‖ from inter-organizational trust to firms technology innovation performance, which deepened the study of the relationships between network relationship and innovation performance, expanded the range of research on theory of intellectual capital, enriched the research content of dynamic capacity theory;furthermore, took some significance for firms to exercise technical innovation management and strategic management. The main conclusions are as follows:(1)Innovation network contributes to meeting firms? demand for external intellectual capital. It is difficult for firms to achieve innovation goals just only by the internal intellectual capital, they need to acquire external intellectual capital to consolidate its knowledge base, promote the diversification of resources, enhance flexibility and reduce risk. Innovation network characterized by knowledge internality, members heterogeneity, opening cooperation, flexibility, and embeddedness, has correspondence with technology innovation. The knowledge internality provides the platform for external intellectual capital acquisition, members heterogeneity ensures the diversification of external intellectual capital, opening cooperation favors the flow of intellectual capital between organizations, flexibility is conducive to meeting firms? dynamic needs, embeddedness provides stable supports to acquisition. Firms can follow these ways to acquire external intellectual capital: monitoring and evaluation of current intellectual capital, external search and identification, introduction and acquisition,integration and application, and lastly evaluation.(2)Inter-organizational trust have positive effects on firms performance. There are two dimensions of trust:cognitive trust and emotional trust, and two dimensions of firms technology innovation performance: incremental innovation performance and radical innovation performance. By promoting solving problems and eliminating uncertainty, inter-organizational trust can reduce innovation costs such as search, negotiation, supervision and management, and can promote transformation and application of the technical innovation. Thus, it is hypothesized that the two dimensions of trust positively affect the two dimensions of innovation performance. After demonstrating the direct relationship by the structural equation modeling and analyzing with sample data, the results show that the four paths from inter-organizational trust to technology innovation performance are significant.(3)The inter-organizational trust has positive impact on technology innovation performance through external intellectual capital acquisition. By enhancing the depth and range of cooperation, promoting interaction, communication and knowledge sharing between partners, inter-organizational trust facilitates the acquisition of external human capital, organizational capital and relational capital. On the other hand, by the integration with internal intellectual capital, external intellectual capital external enriches the resources of firms, expands the innovation vision of firms, helps firms find innovation gaps and make up for deficiencies, and thus positively impacts innovation performance. Structural equation analysis confirms these inferences, and shows that external intellectual capital acquisition plays a significant mediating role between inter-organizational trust and innovation performance.(4) The dynamic capability has positive moderating effect on the relationship between inter-organizational trust and external intellectual capital acquisition. While innovation network and the inter-organizational trust providing the firms many opportunities to contact and understand external intellectual capital, dynamic capacity is conducive to Identify and grasp the resources, and to take fast and effective measures to introduce them inside and achieve integration and utilization, so it is hypothesized that dynamic capacity plays moderating roles in the process of inter-organizational trust influencing external intellectual capital acquisition, and the process of external intellectual capital acquisition influencing innovation performance. Empirical results show that the dynamic capability significantly moderates the former relationship.