The Effects Of Buyer-supplier Social Capital On Supplier Innovativeness

Integrating supplier innovation in product development has become an important trend in open innovation for buyer companies.Unleashing the innovation potential of suppliers and increasing their desire to innovate in response to the product needs of buyer companies is one of the keys to ensuring successful product development and innovation in buyer.companies.Supplier innovativeness is the innovative quality of suppliers in a binary relationship,reflecting their innovative potential and desire.Effectively stimulating supplier innovativeness has become an important topic for practitioners and researchers.A few studies have explored the influence of buyer-supplier collaboration behaviors and some relationship characteristics on supplier innovativeness,and also suggested that the core of supplier innovativeness enhancement is to obtain more valuable resources from the relationship.In the buyer-supplier relationship,social capital,as a non-transferable relationship resource jointly owned by both parties,facilitates the flow and transfer of valuable resources,creating opportunities for enhancing supplier innovativeness.However,the impact and mechanism of buyer-supplier social capital on supplier innovativeness are not yet clear.This limits the management and utilization of supplier relationships by managers in practice and still needs further exploration.This research takes equipment manufacturing buyers in China as the research object,and focus on the mechanism of buyer-supplier social capital on supplier innovativeness.By reviewing the existing literatures,we clarify the configuration of buyer-supplier social capital in a grounded theory basis,and develop measurement scales according to the interview content.Based on social capital theory,the relational view,knowledge-based view,resource-based view and social exchange theory,we have constructed the theoretical framework about the influence mechanism between buyer-supplier social capital and supplier innnovativeness,and developed corresponding hypothesis.Through a large sample questionnaire survey,using structural equation modeling,Bootstrap test and hierarchical regression analysis,we verify that all three dimensions of buyersupplier social capital successfully stimulate supplier innovativeness by enhancing the intensity of supplier innovation,improving the fit between supplier innovation and buyer demand,and increasing the innovation sharing from suppliers to buyer.Moreover,we analyze and test the mediating role of buyer-driven knowledge transfer activities,supplier’s proactive customer orientation and preferred customer status.The innovation points are as follow:(1)Different from previous research that directly adopted the content of social capital in social network,this paper discriminates the content and structure of social capital in buyersupplier relationship.A total of six content structures which reflect the relational,structural and cognitive dimensions of buyer-supplier social capital,including intimacy,respect and reciprocity,interactive ties,interactive configuration,shared mental model,and shared cooperative belief is proposed and the corresponding measurements are combed.It lays a foundation for analyzing and studying the function mechanism of buyer-supplier social capital on the supplier innovativeness.(2)This research analyzes the effects of buyer-supplier social capital on supplier innovativeness.Based on the theory of social capital,this paper reflects the specific connotation of supplier innovation in terms of supplier innovation intensity,supplier innovation fit and supplier innovation sharing,and explains the specific impact of buyer-supplier social capital on supplier innovativeness.The results show that the structural and relational dimensions of buyersupplier social capital enhance all dimensions of supplier innovativeness significantly;and the impact of cognitive social capital on supplier innovation fit and innovation sharing is more significant.These findings make up for the gap of existing researches on the management and utilization of resources in buyer-supplier relationship to enhance supplier innovation,and provide important support for enhancing supplier innovativeness from managing supplier relationships and accumulating social capital.(3)This research explores and explains the influence mechanism of buyer-supplier social capital on supplier innovativeness,and enriches the paths choice for buyers to enhance supplier innovativeness based on dyad relationship.Starting from "pull model","push model" and relationship value,we elaborate the logical links of buyer-supplier social capital on supplier innovativeness.The results show that the improvement of buyer-supplier social capital on supplier innovativeness is achieved through three paths:buyer-driven knowledge transfer activities,supplier’s proactive customer orientation,and preferred customer status.This is an important promotion of the research results related to supplier innovativeness stimulation.(4)Breaking through the paradigm of existing studies which pay more attention to the direct influence of various dimensions,this research clarifies the interactions between structural social capital and relational/cognitive social capital on supplier innovativeness.The results confirm that the improvement effect of structural social capital on all dimensions of supplier innovativeness would be significantly strengthened under the moderating effect of relational social capital and cognitive social capital.These findings provide a new idea for analyzing and understanding the internal influence structure of social capital.All the findings and insights provide the reference for Chinese companies to stimulate supplier innovativeness through the rational construction and management of supplier relationships in a dyad context.