Research On Social Capital And Technical Innovation In Industrial Clusters

Under the economical globalization tendency impetus and facing the competition of intense international market, industrial clusters play important role in improving the competition capacity of region or nation. With the new technical revolution advancement and the industrial specialization, the competitive advantage of industrial clusters is changing from the industrial convergence to the innovation advantage. It is important for the further development of industrial clusters in our country to enhance the ability of technical innovation and cultivate the competitive advantage of clusters.In industrial clusters, it is possible to effectively develop many kinds of cooperation and exchange between enterprises or enterprises and other organizations, and to strengthen the trust relations in both sides. Therefore, industrial clusters can come into being and accumulate massive social capital by the way of its own factors such as close network relations and geographical centralization. In the era of current knowledge economy, the technical innovation is open and non-linear active process. The technical innovation development emphasizes much more interaction between the innovation main body and in the outside as well as the various departments' correlation in the innovation main body itself. The industrial clusters' technical innovation not only includes the technical innovation ability of the interior individual main body in industrial clusters (enterprises or other organizations), but also includes its diffusion and application of the innovation achievements in industrial clusters. In fact, the industrial clusters' technical innovation is different from other innovation, because the innovation network system, which is formed through its own internal social relations in the industrial clusters, can affect the efficiency and the diffusion effect of the technical innovation.Based on the analysis in this papers, the enterprise social capital in industrial clusters has positive effect on the technical innovation,including the information and knowledge transferring, cost saving, innovation capital and resources optimization, and regional social capital in industrial clusters also has positive effect on technical innovation such as orientation, conformity and criterion. The effect which the social capital brings to technical innovation is realized by the way of the learning mechanism and cooperation in industrial clusters. Meanwhile, the network learning and informal intercourse in industrial clusters also have positive effect on the transfer, assimilation and application of the technical innovation achievement such as information, acknowledge, and technique in industrial industry. The technical innovation in industrial clusters can not be separated from the diffusion of technical innovation in enterprise. However, social capital such as regional cultures, value, network relation in special industrial clusters may have positive effect on technical innovation, and it also have some negative effect on technical innovation such as institution locking in Path-Dependence and lower efficiency of technical innovation. Combined the case of Jinjiang shoes industry clusters in Fujian, it has also specifically analyzed the effect which the social capital in Jinjiang shoes industry have on the technical innovation. The result has confirmed the two-sided effect which social capital brings to the technical innovation. Finally, based on the perspective of social capital, it is necessary to take some measures to utilize the positive contributions and restrain the negative contribution which the social capital brings to technical innovation in the industrial clusters, such as to actively build up the regional innovation environment in industrial clusters, and to equilibrize between the local and globalization.