The Collective Knowledge Of The Firms In Cluster-based Innovative Research

Industrial clusters of firms that function as strategic entities in global industries are a matter of considerable interest to regional economic development agencies, corporate managers, and international strategy scholars. Researches of Industrial clusters have come to see knowledge exchange (through technology spillovers, informal exchange, movement of people, and so forth) as critical to defining performance in industrial clusters. At the same time, strategy scholars have widely accepted the importance of knowledge in generating competitive advantage for individual firms. Recognition of the importance of complex, embeded, tacit, firm-specific knowledge resources, capabilities, or competencies as distinguishing features of firms and as determinants of firm-level performance is the key to resource-based views of competitive advantage. In spite of the great number of researches on them, little has been devoted to extend recent the knowledge-based perspective of firm and organizational learning theories to the application of industrial clusters, in order to deeply parse their internal development mechanism. This paper apply a knowledge-based perspective from organization and strategic studies to examine industrial clusters or industrial districts as examples of advantage-generating "superfirm" groups inside industries, within which member firms simultaneously share and differentiate sources of competitive advantage.From Resent research, we can find that the knowledge-based theory for the existence of industrial clusters faces several difficulties. First, despite the numerous assertions that collective knowledge is the key to the cluster competitive advantage, this remains an unsubstantiated and obscure proposition how to define the concept of collective knowledge of industrial clusters and how to discover their sources and contents. Secondly, the researches of collective knowledge and collective learning are privileged, yet these concepts remain ambiguous and their interactions with firm-based learning are left completely unexamined. Thirdly, from the researches, researchers consider that cluster can promote innovation, but the mechanism is ambiguous.In virtue of theory analysis and demonstration research, this paper manages to resolve three interrelated forenamed questions, depending on the outcomes of researches on the knowledge-based perspective of firm, organizational learning theories and cluster theories, and analyzing the concept of collective knowledge of industrial clusters. Using and extending the framework of March's exploitation and exploration, Nonaka's SECI model and Crossan et al's 4I framework, this paper researches the developing mechanism of collective knowledge and the effect of collective knowledge to the cluster competitive advantage. The dividing dimensions of collective knowledge of industrial cluster are employed to describe their factors' common characteristics, in virtue of theory analysis and demonstration research. This process is the precondition of research on the mechanism of the effect of collective knowledge to innovativeness of the member firm of cluster. And then, based on literature review on firm innovativeness, the concept of innovation orientation is put forward and deeply parsed, the method for measuring innovation orientation and firm innovativeness, is also discussed.After all these studies have been done, the model of the effect of collective knowledge to firm innovativeness is confirmed. In the end of the paper, SEM is applied, the model is tested, several policy implications are achieved, and further research issues are put forward, which help rethink the theoretical research and empirical exploration on the competitiveness of industrial clusters.Based on prior research, some conclusions can be achieved as follows.(1) The collective knowledge of industrial cluster is the outcome of the interaction of the member firms, based on traded interdependencies and untraded interdependencies, representing the understandings developed at the industrial cluster level through the routinization of the network of interactions, interdependencies, and common interests among the members. It is a sense of the "rules of the game," available as a tacit understanding to members of the cluster. This knowledge is "in the air"—a public good within the limits of the cluster, shared unevenly by all the clustered members.(2) In the effect of collective knowledge to innovativeness of the member firm of cluster, the structural dimension of collective knowledge plays positive direct influence on learning orientation, market orientation and entrepreneurial orientation of the member firm, the relational dimension of collective knowledge plays positive direct influence on learning orientation, market orientation and entrepreneurial orientation of the member firm, the spatial dimension of collective knowledge plays positive direct influence on learning orientation of the member firm. (3) Innovation orientation plays important intermediary functions on the effect of collective knowledge to innovativeness of the member firm of cluster. The innovation orientation plays positive direct influence on firm innovativeness.Based on the construction and analyses of the model of the effect of collective knowledge to innovativeness of the member firm of cluster, theoretical innovations of the paper will be as follows.(1) The theoretical concept of industrial clusters' collective knowledge and their sources have been proposed. Several scholars argue that, collective knowledge refer to those collective resources shared by industrial district firms, which are neither exclusive to nor the property of the individual firm and not made available to outside firms. However, the concept in this paper refers to collective knowledge, which are collective contribution of clustered members and their knowledge influencing their competitive advantage, based on traded interdependencies and untraded interdependencies, shared unevenly by all the clustered members, and supported by both the interaction among clustered members and the interaction between clustered members and those resources influencing their competitive advantage.(2) This paper puts forward and parses the dividing dimensions of collective knowledge of industrial cluster, the model of dividing dimensions is tested.(3) The model of the effect of collective knowledge to innovativeness of the member firm of cluster has been proposed and tested.