An Empirical Study Of Profiting From Product Innovation In Manufacturing Companies

Innovation is very important for the survival and development of manufacturing enterprises.Especially,product innovation plays a vital role to enhance business performance and long-term competitive advantage.But why do some innovative companies fail to obtain benefits from their innovations?This paper tries to figure it out what regimes of appropriability and complementary assets/capabilities can help Chinese manufacturing enterprises to get benefits from product innovation.Moreover,I further test the moderating role of market uncertainty environment and technology uncertainty environment on the effectiveness of regimes of appropriability and complementary assets/capabilities.Based on the theoretical framework about manufacturing companies profiting from product innovation,this research enriches and develops the theory of Profiting From Innovation(PFI),service innovation in manufacturing companies and so on,and provides theoretical guidances and practical advices to Chinese manufacturing enterprises.The study states as following:the first is theoretical review.This study first comprehensively reviews the literature of PFI,service innovation,technical uncertainty and market uncertainty respectively,to find the gap of these theories.Further,compared with the foreign research and the domestic research ten years ago,this article calculates the average value of regimes of appropriability and complementary assets/capabilities about Chinese enterprises to explore the reason of the difference.Moreover,combined with the literature and descriptive statistical analysis,the paper empirically explores the relationship between product innovation,business performance,regimes of appropriability(intellectual property and trade secrets),and complementary assets/capacity(service oriented,technological ability,and market ability).This study contributes to scholars and practitioners in several ways.From the theoretical perspective:(1)this study adds nuances to the PFI theory in emerging economies and in open innovation situations;(2)this study takes the service orientation into the framework to enrich the PFI theory;(3)the study also comprehensively defines and develops the boundaries of the PFI theory in different market uncertainty environment and technology uncertainty environment;(4)the study makes contribution to the service transformation theory to resolve the conflicting views between product orientation and service orientation in manufacturing enterprises.From a practical view,the results of this study have some implications for practitioners and policy makers:(1)intellectual property strategy is an important regime of appropriability for PFI,which should be regarded as a core strategy;(2)technological ability is important complementary assets to help commercialize product innovation,enterprises should attach great importance to enhancing the technological ability;(3)trade secrets is an invalid tool of appropriability regime,enterprises should not use trade secrets to protect the product innovation of enterprises;(4)market capability is unable to commercialize product innovation effectively,enterprises should use market capability carefully;(5)service orientation may not benefit the firm to profit from the innovation,as manufacturing enterprises have to invest more cost rather benefit from service orientation.However,service orientation can sustain the competitive performance from the long term.Before profit from the investment of service orientation,the companies need to undergo a painful period.