The Formation Mechanism And Performance Effect Of Collective Innovation In Industrial Clusters

In some unexplored ways, numerous small and medium enterprises promote product innovation and technology improvement of industrial clusters as a whole, collectively, constantly and unconsciously. Every company seems to have no particular investment in research and development, but all of them are promoters of technical progress of industrial clusters. Though it is dominant in industrial clusters, few researches have explored the mechanism about this form of innovation. So this dissertation develops the theory of collective innovation to explaining it.The main issuses of this study are:how to define collective innovation?How collective innovation occurred in industrial clusters? How the collective innovation effects firm's innovation performance?To answer these above-mentioned questions, the main works are foused on following aspects:First, the preliminary theoretic model is put forword based on plorative case studies. To develop the analytic framework of collective innovation, its concept is introduced by this study for the first time, plorative case studies are carried out in the Yongkang Hardware Cluster and Huangyan Die&Mold Industry Cluster. The concept of collective innovation, its main dimensions and the initial ananlystic model are proposed through the plorative case studies. After that, empirical analyses are conducted, which includes three sub-researches. The first sub-research is about the formation mechanism of collective innovation, to examine which factores facilitate collective innovation by multivariate linear regression. The scond sub-research is about the moderating effects of environmental dynamic by by multivariate linear regression. The third sub-research is to verify the mechanism of how collective innovation behaviours influence firm innovation performance by Hierarchical Linear Modeling.This dissertation makes some theoretic contributions as follows.First, this dissertation develops the theoretic framework of collective innovation and unveils the "blackbox" of technological innovation in industrial clusters partly. This study treats the firms in industrial clusters as heterogeneous actors, and analyses the knowledge interaction of them. In addition to this, the effect mechanism of knowledge transfer on the factor of cluster level is ananlysed.Scond, this dissertation explored the formation mechanism of collective innovation, through this it enriches and expandes the research on the Community-based Distributed Innovation. Few existing researches has explaining the formation mechanism of distributed innovation well, especially about which factors facilitate the knowledge sharing between firms aiming at profit maximization. As a type of distributed innovation in industrial clusters, its formation mechanism is investigated based on three characteristics-product, knowledge and network related-on the knowledge transfer, and the moderating effects of environmental dynamic on the relationshipin between these three characteristics and knowledge transfer are verified. So this study developes a more integrated analysis framework about the formation mechanism of Cluster-based Distributed Innovation to enrich and expand the research on Distributed Innovation.Third, this dissertation deepens our understanding on the relationgship between knowledge transfer and innovation performance. It shows empirically that the innovation performance is influenced not only by knowledge transfer between firms in industrial clusters but also by the cluster transactive memory system.Moreover this dissertation investigated the influence of knowledge spillover on the originating firm's innovation performance, and the results well explain the theoretical controversy about this issue.