A Study On Relationship Between Open Innovation And Liability Of Newness

Driven by the engine of“mass entrepreneurship and innovation”,the information technology has been integrating deeply into the economic development in China these years.Both innovation and entrepreneurship have been gradually becoming a new impetus to overcome the challenges in the China's new normal economy.On the one hand,under the background of the Internet era,lots of innovative forms,like crowd funding,crowd sourcing,virtual community,hacker space and innovation ecosystem have been relentlessly emerging,so that open innovation model has been more and more popularized.On the other hand,along with the dramatic changes in the external business environment,the start-ups in China are confronted with lots of new challenges and opportunities for survival.So,how to avoid the failure of the start-ups has become a key issue which is directly related to the national economic vitality,industrial development and social harmony.Since Stinchcombe(1965)firstly propounded the proposal that the main reason of high failure rate existing in new ventures lies in liability of newness,the concept of liability of newness and its improvement mechanism has developed into an important research field of entrepreneurship and enterprise growth.However in China,profound changes have taken place in the field of innovation management,commercialization process and organization structure transforming during recent years,which brought new challenges and new requirements to the traditional understanding and improvement mechanism with respect to liability of newness.So the research on liability of newness and its improvement mechanism from the perspective of open innovation is becoming a needed issue in practical and theoretical study of entrepreneurial management.From the point of open innovation and on the basis of literature review,the dissertation is to explore "how open innovation proclivity and practices influence the improvement of liability of newness for new ventures.We attempt to explore the following sub-questions:(1)Which type of open innovation activities will help improve the liability of newness of start-ups?(2)What is the mechanism of open innovation influences improvement of liability of newness?And whether the characteristics of the enterprises network structure have effect on this process?(3)Whether open innovation will affect the new venture performance through the improvement of liability of newness?Based on the observation from the phenomenon of rapid growth of China's entrepreneurship and the practical problems of the innovation mode transforming under the circumstance of the open economy,this dissertation deeply reviewed the relevant literatures concerning the theories on liability of newness,open innovation,environment match and enterprise agility,and explore the above-mentioned questions in three sub-researches.Research method including literature bibliometrics and interview,as well as quantitative research were conducted.Firstly,based on previous literature review and pilot study,the first sub-research builds up a theoretical model of the effect of five types of open innovation practices on liability of newness.Moreover,through the reliability analysis and confirmatory factor analysis(CFA)as well as multiple regression analysis,an empirical research on the results of a questionnaire survey of 256 Chinese start-ups was conducted.Finally several open innovation practice which are conducive to the improvement of liability of newness were identified in the round,thus provide a foundation for the next research work.Secondly,based on the results of the former sub-researches,the second sub-research introduces three mediators including customer agility,partner agility and operation agility,and two types of moderate variables as network closure and structure hole to examine the influential mechanism of open innovation proclivity on improvement of the liability of newness.256 Chinese start-ups were investigated via questionnaire survey,and reliability analysis and confirmatory factor analysis(CFA)as well as multiple regression analysis were conducted,thus identified the mediating effect of the different enterprise agility during the process that open innovation proclivity influences the improvement of the liability of newness,and the moderating effects of the two types of network structure in the process.Additionally,grounded on the above research,the third sub-research has made a further analysis on the mechanism which open innovation proclivity promote performance of Chinese start-ups through the improvement the liability of newness.Targeting at the theoretical gap that there is little discussion on the effect of liability of newness on the corporate performance,this sub-research explored the intermediary role of the improvement of liability of newness during the process which open innovation proclivity influences performance of Chinese start-ups.Moreover,through the reliability analysis and confirmatory factor analysis(CFA)as well as multiple regression analysis,an empirical research on the results of a questionnaire survey of 246 Chinese start-ups was conducted which identified the mediating path mechanism of liability of newness in the process which open innovation proclivity influences performance of start-ups.The main conclusions in the dissertation are as follows:(1)Different open innovation practice have different effects on the improvement of liability of newness in Chinese start-ups.Empirical studies show that technology scouting,vertical technology collaboration and horizontal technology collaboration play a significant role in the improvement of the liability of newness of the enterprises.However,the effect of technology purchasing and outbound open innovation on the liability of newness of new ventures has not been verified.(2)Through the mediating effect of organizational agility,the open innovation proclivity can improve the liability of newness in Chinese start-ups.Through the questionnaire survey of 246 new ventures,it has been examined that the organizational agility,especially the customer agility and partner agility,have important intermediating effect in the process which open innovation proclivity influences the liability of newness.However,statistics showed that operational agility has failed to have intermediating effect in that process.(3)Network structure plays an important moderating roles in the mechanism that open innovation proclivity influences the enterprise agility of the start-ups.Under the different level of network closure and structural hole,the open innovation proclivity makes different effect on the the enterprise agility of the start-ups.First,under the condition of low and moderate level from network closure,the indirect effects of customer agility and partner agility are significantly enhanced,while that under the condition of high network closure,the effect have not been significantly enhanced.Additionally,in the context of low and medium-level of structural hole,the indirect effect of customer agility is significant,while in the context of high-level of structural hole,the indirect effect has not been significantly enhanced.What's more,when the structural hole is at low,middle and high levels,the indirect effect of partner agility is significant and has been strengthened.(4)Open innovation proclivity has a positive effect on the liability of newness of new ventures,and the liability of newness and its internal dimension plays a mediating effect during the process that open innovation proclivity influences the new ventures performance.Through the questionnaire survey of 246 new ventures,this sub-research has not only testified that the open innovation proclivity makes a significant positive impact on promoting the liability of newness.Moreover,the liability of newness and its three dimensions including technical legitimacy,corporate responsibility and availability can have a significant intermediary effect on the process that open innovation proclivity influence the new ventures performance.This dissertation managed to expand and deepen the research in the following three aspects:(1)This dissertation theoretically puts forward and empirically verified the influence of open innovation on the liability of newness,further validating the effectiveness of the construct of the liability of newness,enriching and expanding the open innovation research in the entrepreneurial context.(2)This dissertation theoretically examines and empirically testifies the mechanism of the open innovation proclivity influence the liability of newness,and find the mediating effects of enterprise agility as well as the moderating effect of network structure,thus meet the research gap of the improvement mechanism of the liability of newness,so as to enrich and developed the research of organizational agility from the perspective of innovation management.(3)This dissertation theoretically put forward and empirically proved the intermediary effect of the liability of newness in the process that open innovation proclivity influences the performance of the new ventures,which has enriched and expanded the relevant research on the mediating effects of open innovation on new enterprise performance.