The Study Of Product Modularity’s Impact On Enterprises’ Innovation Performance

Modularity has gradually become a hot research topic for economists and managementscholars with the rapid development of IT and network economic nowadays. Existed researchabout modularity mainly concentrated in the modularity’s theory, characteristic, classification,architecture, and modular product development and application. Foreign scholars have carriedout research on causes, effects and mechanism of modularity through the empirical analysis,while domestic is focusing more on qualitative research than the empirical study.Currently, empirical studies about modularity are mostly abroad based on developedcountries’ conditions. Our country’s economy and enterprise development status differ fromthe abroad. Therefore, conclusions of foreign scholars’ research are applicable to domesticenterprises applicability is still unknown.This article aims to analyze product modularity’s impact on innovative performance. Onthe basis of sorting out domestic and foreign research on products modularity, a theoreticalmodel about product modularity and innovation performance was built, considering actualsituation of current domestic enterprises’ modularity development that have investigated. Inthis model, modularity is divided into modular product design and manufacture, to study theirimpacts on enterprises’ innovation performance; introduced enterprise knowledge sharingmechanism as an influencing factor, to study its regulation impact on product modularity andenterprise innovation performance, adding firm size and firm age as control variables.After reliability and validity analysis, correlation and regression analysis of obtained data,the empirical results show that both modular product design and manufacture have significantpositive impact on innovation performance, where enterprises’knowledge sharing mechanismhas a significant positive regulation, means that the more perfect knowledge sharingmechanism, the product modularity has more significant impact on innovation performance.This conclusion has enriched the relational model and empirical study about productmodularity and enterprises’ innovation performance, giving theoretical guidance forpromoting product modularity implementation.