| In recent years, with the increasing trend of economic globalization, great changes have taken place in the enterprise survival’s market environment:product life cycle continuously shortening, the user needs change constantly strengthening, fiercer competition between enterprises intensifying, etc. In this situation, many firms spanned enterprise boundaries to integrate related activities or tasks to reduce unnecessary processes by using information technologies and communication networks like Web2.0and cloud computing. Besides, they transmitted related knowledge and information in real time with closer cooperation, to create new and unique business processes with their partners, and then continuously developed new products, services and marketing strategies to generate new business value. For example, in the level of different industries, the leaders in E-commerce, taken JD.com, TMALL.com, and1th shop.com as the representative, opened up the digital environment of online retail, and introduced POP (open platform) to accelerate the pace of transforming traditional enterprise into online retail, then broke the competition pattern of traditional retail industry and brought industry revolution. In the level of firm, facing the impact of online travel service providers like Ctrip, the traditional travel agencies, taken Shanghai spring and autumn, CYTS, and Wuhan spring and autumn as the representative, innovatively introduced B2B distribution platform to change competition among travel agencies, and opened up an new pattern of travel services chain of wholesaler developing products to retailer providing terminal services. Therefore, in the context of inter-firm e-business, how to apply e-business to gain inter-firm process innovation and process innovation capability that can constantly create new products, services and marketing strategies, have become the key issue in field of value creation by applying e-business.At present, researches in the field of e-business innovation are roughly divided into following three categories:first, the researches are theoretical analyses which emphasize the innovation opportunities in all aspects that were created by using the characteristics of IT and e-business technology, such as the mix of Web and Internet, and supply management system, IT can create innovation opportunities for firms in many aspects of business, cooperation, communication, connection, computing and so on. Second, the researches are empirical studies, and focus on the improvement and innovation that the usage type of IT (use and explore) can generate for existing resources and process. For instance, Mani Subramani and Nada R. Sanders et al, using empirical method demonstrate the two types of IT usage (use and explore) can improve and innovate knowledge or processes. The third type of research includes service process innovation proposed by Ja-Shen Chen et al, and explores the effect of IT capability on service process innovation. Generally speaking, those three types of research have highlighted the existence of innovation caused by e-business or IT. Tallon believed strategy is reflection of firm level, while process is micro reflection of strategy. Therefore, new business pattern is eventually reflected in process level, and the innovations caused by IT and e-business are also manifested by the process. As a result, this study focus on studies of process innovations, but this kind of research (the third type) is limited. This type of research based on resource-based view, and only focus on firm’s internal IT resources and capabilities, while overlook external environment. Therefore, it is not suitable for the research on the process innovation capability driven by inter-firm e-business.This paper define the process innovation capability driven by inter-firm e-business as the capability that can form competitive advantages by creating new and unique business processes to generate new products, services and marketing strategies. It is a new business capability generated by applying inter-organizations e-business process, and it reflects the ability which formed by using IT to reconfigure resources and capabilities to cope with the environment. Dynamic capability refers to the capability that can integrate, structure, and reconfigure internal and external competitiveness to cope with rapidly changing environment. The starting point of dynamic capability is the dynamic environment, and its feature is the adaptive adjustment of changing environment. Therefore, the process innovation capability is a kind of dynamic capability. At present, in IS field, the studies applying dynamic capability view mainly focus on the agile capability, and still have not found the researches using dynamic capability view to study the direct effect of IT usage on innovation capability. Dynamic capability can not only adapt to the environment, but also change or even create a new environment. As a result, this study takes dynamic capability as theoretical basis, and focus on how to using e-business to gain firm process innovation and process innovation capability that can constantly create new products, services and marketing strategies to realize value innovation in the context of inter-firm e-business.Based on dynamic capability, this study explores the formation of process innovation capability driven by inter-firm e-business and its value-driven process. Besides, according to the characteristics of IT usage of Chinese firms in the downstream of the supply chain, it divides the research question into the following two contents:(1) how inter-firm e-business can generate process innovation capability of core firm;(2) how the process innovation capability improves the competitive advantage of core firm. Based on the data collect from194firms in China, and applying empirical approach of PLS to analyze data, we find two important conclusions:first, the collaborative process capabilities for channel partners, the collaborative process capabilities for customers and the inter-firm knowledge sharing have significant direct influence on the process innovation capability, and environmental volatility has a negative moderation in this process. Second, the process innovation capability plays an important role on strategic performance.The innovations of this study are presented in the following two aspects:first, according the features of application of inter-firm e-business process, this paper proposes the concept of process innovation capability driven by inter-firm e-business, and reveals the value creation process of inter-firm e-business by analyzing the relationship between IT technological capability and business capability. It also covers the gap in operation management field focusing on IT business capability and in the field of information system focusing on IT technological capability. Second, this paper finds:the negative moderation effect of environmental volatility exists in the three relationships between process innovation capability respectively and the collaborative process capability facing channel partners, the collaborative process capability facing customer, knowledge sharing, which present the characteristic of inter-organization reconfiguration and verify that a relatively stable environment is conducive to reconfigure business capability by coordinating various factors to gain competition advantage in applying inter-firm e-business process. However, the current researches about dynamic capability in information system field only take the moderation effect of environmental volatility on the process of capability creating value into account, while overlook the moderation effect of environmental volatility on the process of capability forming, this study extends the cognition of effect of environmental volatility in formation process of dynamic capability. |
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