Study Of The Impact Of Network Connection And Network Competence On Innovation Performance Of SMEs

With the rapid development of information technology in today’s world, the process of economic globalization is unfolding, and the building of enterprises independent innovation capability have been referred to the level of the national development strategy. As the main force of Chinese national economic development, innovation capacity of individual small and medium enterprise is challenged. The need of external forces for SMEs makes the enterprises to form innovation networks with other enterprises, departments and agencies through contractual relations, cooperation networks and social relations. And SMEs carry out innovation activities under network conditions in order to promote technology spillovers and knowledge sharing. However, due to the complexity and uncertainty of technological innovation and the imperfections of policy support, security system, laws and regulations and other factors, the SMEs network connection and innovation activities have been difficult.This paper researched the relationship of network connection and innovation performance from the aspect of external network connection, and the network connection is formed by enterprises and suppliers, the enterprises, research institutions, universities and financial institutions etc. Most existing studies focus only on the positive impact of network connection on performance, did not reveal the internal impact mechanism of network connection on innovation performance. The gap of internal mechanism is yet to be studied and discussed. So, this paper introduced the network competence into the study of network connection and innovation performance, and tried to explore the impact mechanism of network connection, network competence and innovation performance.Firstly, according to the collation and analysis of the literature, this paper divided the network connection of SMEs into prominent organizations connection and knowledge intensive business service organization connection. In the context of existing research and research purposes, capacity of the network is divided into two categories, the network build management competence and relationship management competence. Secondly, according to the related theories, build a conceptual model of the impact mechanism of two type connections on innovation performance and the impact mechanism of network connection, network capability and innovation performance. Thirdly, the paper started the questionnaire design, distribution and recovery, then, conducted the descriptive statistical analysis and evaluation scales for reliability and validity testing for the data collected. Finally, this research built the structural equation models to study the impact mechanism of network connection, network capability and innovation performance. Then this paper conducted the structural equation model fitting and validation analysis.According to the validation results of the structural equation models, this paper conducted the empirical conclusion analysis, draw the following main conclusions of this study. Firstly, the network connection of SMEs has a significant positive impact on the innovation performance. Secondly, in the internal mechanism of prominent organizations connection on the innovation performance, network competence plays partially mediating role, and network competence plays fully mediating role the internal mechanism of knowledge intensive business service organization connection on the innovation performance. Then, combined with the practical problems of the development of SMEs in innovation network, this paper proposed appropriate policy recommendations and presented the drawbacks of the research and the prospects for future research.