Research On Mechanisms Of Enterprise Knowledge Search On Technological Innovation Performance

More enterprises embrace open innovation by breaking boundaries to seek heterogeneous knowledge when they face the fierce competitive environment,complex market demands and increasingly rapid technology change.In this context,the innovation ability of an enterprise is not only closely related to its own knowledge base,but also greatly affected by external knowledge.As an effective means to obtain resources,break through bottleneck of innovation,and acquire competitive advantage,knowledge search has become one of the hottest topics in strategic management and innovation management domain.However,in the process of deepening management,isolated local search or boundary-spanning search cannot meet the needs of corporate innovation.Both internal and external knowledge have equally important roles in organizational learning and innovation.Existing researches have been carried out to find the mechanism between knowledge search and innovation performance,but a unified conclusion has not been reached yet.At the same time,the scholars put more emphasis on boundary-spanning search or external knowledge search,but ignore the role of local knowledge search in context of open innovation.Moreover,the perspectives of extant literature about mediator variables mainly focus on absorptive capacity and knowledge integration,other variable need to be discussed.With the continuous development of IT,the search ways and approaches have changed fundamentally.How do IT resources and capabilities effect the relationship between knowledge search and innovative performance is still remain unexplored for theory and practice.Furthermore,the rationality of knowledge search strategy and local adaptability of research conclusions in a special situation of the emerging economies also need more attention in this field.In view of above background,this paper is dedicated to the further exploration of the impact mechanism between knowledge search and enterprise technological innovation performance,hoping to make a certain contribution to unify research conclusions.In addition,we divide the main variables into different dimensions to make the results more concrete.Focuses on the core issue of “how knowledge search affects enterprise technological innovation performance”,this article raised the following research questions:(1)will different knowledge search behaviors affect the different types of innovation performance,and what are the different directions and strengths of their effects?(2)whether the knowledge base would be a mediating role between knowledge search and innovation performance?(3)how do external political environment and internal IT capacity affect the relationship between the two?To solve the issues above-mentioned,this study integrates the perspectives of knowledge base view,organizational learning theory,contingency theory,institutional theory,ability theory,etc.,and attempts to uncover the black box of knowledge search that affects technological innovation performance through various research methods such as bibliometric research,exploratory case analysis,theoretical deduction,and statistical analysis.The empirical tests of different types of sample data draw the following conclusions.Firstly,knowledge search(both local and boundary-spanning)significantly promote technological innovation performance(including radical,incremental,product,and process).Secondly,different knowledge search behaviors have different degrees of impact on technological innovation performance.More specifically,the role of boundary-spanning search always has a stronger positive impact than local search.Thirdly,knowledge search has a positive effect on the knowledge base(knowledge breadth and depth),and the boundary-spanning search has a stronger promotion effect on knowledge base than local search.Fourthly,there is a positive impact of knowledge base on innovation performance.Specifically speaking,knowledge base plays a full mediating role in the relationship between local search and innovation performance,but a partial mediating role in the relationship between boundary-spanning search and innovation performance.Fifthly,uncertainty of the political environment strengthens the positive effect of local search on product innovation,but negatively regulates the relationship between boundary-spanning search and process innovation.Last but not the least,IT capability enhance the positive role of local search in promoting innovation performance,but weaken the positive effect of boundary-spanning search on innovation performance.Above research conclusions deepen the understanding of the mechanism between knowledge search and technological innovation performance.This paper analyzes the relationship between various variables from different dimensions,and compares the impact of different knowledge search behaviors,which enriches the existing research framework.Based on the knowledge base view,a theoretical model with knowledge base as an intermediary variable is established to provide a new idea for the intermediary mechanism between knowledge search and technological innovation performance.At the same time,it explores the moderating role of external political environment and internal IT capability in view of contingency factors.This also further deepens the discussion of the regulatory mechanism between the two,and perfects the combination of pre-variables of technological innovation performance.In general,this study not only enriches the research results in strategic and innovation management,but also provides new insights and theoretical guidance for Chinese enterprise managers in the context of open innovation in formulating search strategies and choosing innovation paths.