Technology Acquisition Mode, New Product Development Process

The competition of the domestic market has become more and more drastic with the globalization of economy and China entering the WTO. All the firm are ought to develop the most appropriate new products in the shortest time if they want to survive in the drastic competition. And they will encounter the problem how to acquire the needed technology at first. Technology has being the most important resource and how to manage technology has become an important component of the firm strategy, as called Technology Strategy. The choice of technology acquisition modes is a very important step of technology strategy and has a long term influence on the firms. However, there are only a few researchers paying attention on the factors of the choice of technology acquisition modes and the relationship between the firm performance and the technology acquisition modes, the specialists who do research in this area are seldom and furthermore, fewer Chinese researchers have studied this subject.Based on the former research, this research is try to do some tentative researches using the sample of the Chinese Information Technology industry. In this study, broad categories of technology acquisition methods are grouped by the extent of a firm's R&D involvement into three modes: Inhouse R&D, R&D cooperation, and technology purchasing. And there are two research subjects for this study. One is to identify the factors which will influence the choice of technology acquisition modes and find out the most significant factor. And the other is doing a tentative study on the initial relationship between the technology acquisition modes and the firm performance. The data is gathered mainly by the questionary delivered to the firms bye E-mail. It took nearly one and half months and nearly 300 copies of questionary are sent. And at last 131 questionaries are collected and 104 are available, the available ratio is 79.4%. The sample is then analyzed by the SPSS 11.5, and the reliability and the validity are both good, it will be meaningful to do the futher analysis. In this study, we mainly use Analysis of Variances (ANOVA), Multiple Discriminate Analysis (MDA), and Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) to indentify the significant factors which will influence the choice of the technology acquisition modes.There are two main innovative point in this study. First, this study use the domestic IT firms as the sample to study the relationships between many factors and the choice of technology acquisition modes. And the characteristics of thetechnology, the characteristics of the firm and the characteristics of the environment are all have impacts on the choice of technology acquisition modes. However, contrary to the former researches, the characteristics of the technology are more important than the others in this study. And the uncertainty of the technology is the most significant factor. Second, the relationship between the technology acquisition modes and the firm performance is researched, it is a tentative study to a large extent. However, no significant relationships between the sole technology acquisition mode and the firm performance was found. It is a good complementarity for the research of firm performance, but due to the limited samle, it needs further research to verify the conclision of the study.