| Since the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China,the world has undergone tremendous changes that have not been seen in a century.The global pandemic of COVID-19 has accelerated this change.China has entered a stage of high-quality development and must make every effort to improve its independent innovation capabilities and make breakthroughs in key core technologies as soon as possible.The growth of big science is not only reflected in the expansion of scientific research,but also in the establishment of more and more scientific collaboration relationships among different organizations.Scientific collaboration plays an important role in the production of scientific knowledge,and scientific knowledge produced by scientific research is essential to firm innovation.Previously,many scholars from all over the world have conducted investigations on scientific collaboration,suggesting that scientific collaboration will affect firm innovation.However,most existing studies are based on the impact of joint patent application technology collaboration networks towards firm innovation,or the impact of scientific collaboration networks based on scientific publication partnerships towards scientific output.Little attention has been paid to the paper coauthorship between firms and URIs(Universities and Research Institutes)and its effect on firm technological innovation.Coauthored papers can best reflect scientific collaboration.The number of coauthored papers and collaboration status can reflect the development speed and quality of scientific collaboration and academic exchanges in a certain sense.In order to comprehensively measure the technological competitiveness and innovation output,innovation performance can be divided into innovation quantity and quality.A broad knowledge base enables firms to better understand background knowledge or complementary knowledge,but only through knowledge diversity can the firm innovation be affected.Environment is highly dynamic in nearly all high-tech industries,and it is becoming even more unpredictable after COVID-19.Hence,the strategies for firms and governments to cope with highly dynamic environment become critical.Therefore,from perspectives of innovation quantity and quality,this paper focuses on the impact of relationship embeddedness of SCNs and knowledge diversity on firm innovation,and the moderating role of environmental dynamics.The main contents are as follows:Firstly,analyzing the formation of SCNs and the characteristics of relationship embeddedness.At first,this paper analyzes the motivation for firms to participate in scientific collaboration,and constructs a game model to explore the conditions of the formation of scientific collaboration relationship.Then this paper analyzes the organizational model of the SCN based on different leading subjects participating in the scientific collaboration project,combined with the dynamic dimension.Besides,this paper analyzes the differences of the important relationship embeddedness characteristics and that between knowledge acquisition and transfer in the SCN.In addition,this paper uses the new-energy vehicle industry paper co-authorship data from2000 to 2017 to construct an industrial SCN to objectively show network evolution and changes of the relationship among focal organizations.Secondly,analyzing the direct effect of the relationship embeddedness of the SCN on firm innovation.This paper analyzes the general mode of embedded effect of SCN relationship based on process benefits,then chooses suitable data sources for the empirical study,and constructs a SCN using coauthored papers participated by 174patent-produced firms in new-energy vehicle industry in China from 2004 to 2015.Considering knowledge acquisition and knowledge transfer,this paper analyzes the direct effect mechanism of SCN relationship embeddedness on firm innovation based on relationship breadth and strength.The results show that the relationship breadth has no significant effect on innovation quantity,but it can indirectly affect the relationship between the relationship strength and innovation quantity;the relationship strength has a significant positive effect on innovation quantity;neither the relationship breadth nor the strength has a significant effect on innovation quality.Thirdly,incorporating SCN relationship,knowledge diversity and firm innovation into a same framework.Based on the resource-capability-performance path,knowledge diversity is divided into discipline diversity and technological diversification from dimensions of science and technology.This paper in-depth analyzes the intermediary mechanism of discipline diversity and technological diversification.The results based on the new-energy vehicle industry show that knowledge diversity are intermediators between network relationship and firm innovation;discipline diversity is the intermediator between relationship strength and innovation quantity,while relationship breadth affects both innovation quantity and quality through technological diversification.The study also shows that technological diversification activities help firms increase both innovation quantity and quality,while discipline diversification activities only help firms increase innovation quantity.Fourthly,analyzing the contingent impact of environmental dynamics on the relationship embeddedness of SCN and firm innovation.The contingency-based resource-based view explains two important dimensions of environmental dynamics-technological dynamics and market dynamics.This paper analyzes the moderating mechanism of technological dynamics and market dynamics in the embeddedness of network relationships on firm innovation.The results find that technological dynamics positively moderates the effect of network relationship breadth on innovation quantity,while market dynamics negatively moderates the effect of network relationship strength on innovation quantity.Neither technological dynamics nor market dynamics has a significant role in moderating the relationship between network embeddedness and innovation quality.Technological dynamics is not conducive to both innovation quantity and quality;market dynamics is not conducive to the innovation quantity,while its impact on innovation quality is not significant.This paper combines theories of collaborative innovation,network embeddedness,resource bases,contingency,and investigates SCNs based on paper coauthorship,uses patents to measure firm innovation from perspectives of quantity and quality,and expands the research on firm SCN and technological innovation,and helps to explore the relationship between scientific research and technological development.This paper divides knowledge diversity into discipline diversity and technology diversity from dimensions of science and technology,and uses discipline diversity and technological diversification as the intermediary variables to explore the ways in which SCNs affect firm innovation.This method of combining science and technology factors broadens existing research perspectives,enriches related theories such as technological innovation and strategic management,and opens the black box of research on“Paper collaboration network-Technological innovation performance”.The research conclusions provide new ideas for effectively implementing strategies of cross-discipline integration and cross-technology integration,enhancing firm innovation and accelerating the pace of industrial transformation and upgrading.In addition,they have important guiding significance for industrial practice,and provide a valuable reference for the country to formulate scientific and reasonable policies to enhance the level of industrial scientific research and transformation between scientific and technological achievements. |
PDF Full Text Request