An Empirical Research On The Relationship Between Open Innovation、 Technology Commercialization Competence And Firm Growth

Innovation, entrepreneurship and venture capital have been becoming the topical melody of the times. The development of the economic globalization has placed an increasing pressure on the enterprises, and technology commercialization has become a common strategy to maintain their competence. With the increasing of social connection, it is quite hard for the enterprise to win the battle all by it itself, which means that open innovation has gradually become the main pattern of startup innovation. More and more companies have been consciously or unconsciously engaged in the practice of open innovation. Theorists have launched a series of researches on the open innovation. By now, the research on this theme is still on the early stage of rapid accumulation without forming a united theory system, and the main research forms are theory construction and case analysis with a limited number of empirical studies. Meanwhile, controversial conclusions are drawn about the relationship of open innovation and firm performance. Some scholars hold the view that open innovation has a positive effect on business performance, while some argue that it has a negative one, some also believe that the relationship between open innovation and business performance is an inverted “U” shape. Then what effects open innovation has on the firm performance, whether openness can absolutely bring firm growth, what the mechanism of the open innovation is to bring firm growth and what conditions are needed, have become the focus of our research.Besides, open innovation is firstly applied in the large technology companies in USA and other European developed countries, and mainly in the research of computer, information technology, pharmaceuticals and other high-tech industries such as IBM, Intel, Lucent Technologies etc. As for china, we are in a critical stage of economic transformation upgrading, besides, the open innovation contexts of Chinese and western countries are different, therefore, whether open innovation is applicable for the industries and enterprises under the circumstance of our country, how to efficiently take advantage of open innovation and what kind of open innovation should our country construct to promote successful commercialization have become a issue urged to be addressed.Based on technology commercialization activity of startups, this paper is aimed at revealing the influence mechanism of open innovation on firm growth to provide a theoretical basis and practical reference for enterprises to better implement technology commercialization by comprehensively using theoretical analysis and empirical research methods, and doing a research surrounding how the startups are successfully commercialized in the open innovation practice. The research includes the following questions:1. What is the relationship of the two-way open innovations(including inbound and outbound) and the firm growth? Do they share the same degree of their influence on the business growth? 2. What is the mechanism of open innovation’ effect on firm growth? 3. Does external environment have moderating effect on the relationship of open innovation and firm growth? Is the moderating effect consistent?The theory analysis of this research refers to theoretical knowledge and method of economics, management, financial management, technical innovation, finance, statistics and other disciplines. The empirical research mainly adopts 224 questionnaires, uses factor analysis, correlation analysis and regression analysis and other statistic analyzing methods, analyzes the path relationship that the assumption proposes, examine whether the hypotheses and conceptual model is valid, verifies and accesses the model. With the support of the questions mentioned above and some related theories, this research proposes 5 groups, 16 hypothesis in total, among which 14 hypothesis are supported which 2 is partly. The conclusions of this research are as follows:1. Both inbound open innovation and outbound open innovation have a significant positive correlation with firm growth, which means the firm will grow well with adopting either the inbound open innovation or outbound open innovation, or both of these. This paper integrates inbound and outbound open innovation in a framework, and researches their influences on business growth, in order to provide an efficient way and theory guide for the promotion of startup growth.2. Technology commercialization capacity has a significant positive correlation with firm growth, which means the stronger the technology commercialization capacity, the more conducive to business growth. Technology commercialization strategy capacity totally mediates the relationship between inbound open innovation and firm growth, but partly mediates the relationship between outbound open innovation and business growth, among which technology commercialization process capacity totally mediates the relationship between inbound open innovation and firm growth, and partly mediates the relationship between outbound open innovation and firm growth. By intruding technology commercialization capacity, an important variable of entrepreneurship and innovation, into research model, and drawing a conclusion that it has a positive effect on and plays a mediating role in business growth performance, it is proved to be an important way of the transition from open innovation to business growth performance.3. Environment competitiveness has a negative moderating effect on the relationship of inbound open innovation and firm growth, which means the weaker the environment competitiveness is, the stronger the effects of inbound openness on business growth are. Environment competitiveness also has a negative moderating effect on the relationship between outbound open innovation and firm growth significantly. In addition, relaxed environment also has negative moderating effect on the relationship between inbound, outbound open strategy and firm growth significantly. Enterprises can jointly contribute to the successful implementation of enterprise open innovation strategy and the growth performance through the combination and combined promotion of inbound and outbound open innovation. Meanwhile, to examine the salient features of the context under the ground of Chinese economic transformation, which are environment competitiveness and environment munificence and introduce it into the model as a contingent variable, makes the research more persuasive on the whole. By doing a specific empirical research on the model data of questionnaires of 278 Chinese enterprises, innovative conclusions of an novel model of "Environment——Strategy——Capability——Performance" are drawn, which promotes the development of open innovation theory.