Relationship Between Network Competence Of Core Firm And Network Innovation Performance

Currently, the state is making effort to promote the optimization and upgrading of industrial structure, and develop strategic emerging industries, and organize and implement a number of major industrial innovation development projects, and cultivate a number of strategic emerging industries core enterprises. Technological innovation network as important organizational form of implementation of technological innovation activities in order to obtain core and key technologies in strategic emerging industries had received widespread attention.The core enterprises of the emerging strategic industries has an important impact on the success of technology innovation network.Although centrality often associate with the control of certain key resources which bring the power and influence, part of technological innovation network show some characteristics:(1) Though the core firm is the object to implement management activities, the core firm does not make an order and autonomous members with complementary resource have no obligation to enforce any order; (2) Technological innovation networks can be seen as loosely coupled organization.The various components maintain mutual responsiveness as a whole, while maintain a certain degree of independence and uniqueness. The paper analyzed the impact mechanism of network competence of the core firm on the network innovation performance on the basis of these characteristics of the technology innovation network.Existing research had divided the network competence into different types from multiple perspectives, therefore, the impact of different kinds of network competence on the network innovation performance can be analyzed.Meanwhile, the existing studies had recognized that technology innovation networks as a new innovative organization which should be implemented some management activities by the core firm to affect the network innovation. The network competence owned by core firm is the foundation and guarantee of the implementation of various management activities, therefore, the network competence of core firm will affect network innovation through network management activities which is worthy of further analysis.The above aspects had been studied using the survey data and assumptions had been empirically analyzed. The innovation results are as follows:(1 Relationship between network competence of core firm and network innovation is analyzed. The results show that:transformational leadership of the core firm is not conducive to exploratory innovation and has an unclear relationship with the exploitative innovation, but the network relationship competence can promote two types of technological innovation activities.(2)The impact of management activities of core firms on the technological innovation activities is analyzed.The results show that:the knowledge mobility has an positive impact on the exploratory innovation,but has an unobvious positive impact on the exploitative innovation; the innovation appropriability has an positive impact on the exploitative innovation, but has an unobvious positive impact on the exploratory innovation; network stability has an positive impact on the exploitative innovation, but has an inverted U impact on the exploratory innovation;(3) The impact of network competence of core firms on the network management activities is analyzed.The results show that:both network relationship competence and network vision competence have positive impact on the knowledge mobility, innovation appropriability and network stability;(4)The mediation effect of network management activities is analyzed. The results show that:the knowledge mobility is the mediator variable between network relationship competence and exploratory innovation; innovation appropriability is the partial mediator variable between network relationship competence and exploitative innovation; network stability is the partial mediator variable between network relationship competence and exploitative innovation.Overall, this paper makes some progress for existing research, and also has some reference for the reality of management in practice.