An Empirical Study On The Influence Of Firms’ R&D Internationalization And Network Position On Innovation Performance

Nowadays,economy and technology are rapidly developing, the trend of globali-zation is also increasingly obvious. When enterprises developed to a certain extent, to choose internationalization strategy will bring more resources and profits. Of course, it is also need to pay more efforts. Innovation is the source of enterprises’vitality, enterprise’s R&D internationalization will bring certain influence to its innovation performance. The complexity of innovation make the enterprise get to cooperate with each other, and the enterprise cooperative R&D networks have been built because of more and more cooperative relations. It make the enterprise be able to use the power of the web to improve their innovation performance.This paper suggests R&D internationalization and a firm’s network position can influence the innovation performance. On the basis of theoretical analysis, this paper discusses what roles would R&D internationalization and network position be in the process of improving innovation performance, and the research hypothesis and model are raised. By adopting the Chinese listed companies of automobile industry from2000to2010, the patent data are collected. We construct the automobile enterprise cooperative R&D networks, and we get network data by social network analysis software Ucinet, R&D internationalization data by manual retrieval. On that basis,8multiple linear regression models are constructed to test the hypothesis. We argue that the network centrality and intermediary position play moderating roles in affecting the relationship between corporate R&D internationalization strategy and its innovation performance. The results suggest that the establishment of overseas R&D centers has positive effect on firms’innovation performance, and the more dominant position in collaboration network is beneficial for firms’ innovativeness. Meanwhile, the network centrality and intermediary position play positively moderating the relationship between firms’R&D internationalization strategy and innovation performance.