| Under the background of the rise of knowledge economy and economic restructuring within China, whether a firm‘s innovation activities could be conducted smoothly, whether it can gain and keep its competitive advantages are tightly restricted by how well it handles knowledge creation, transformation and exploitation. Open innovation theory has been defined as the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation respectively. Nowadays, we are facing a new situation that technologies are renewing on a daily basis, markets are becoming more and more turbulent and consumer orientations are rapidly changing, many firms has chosen open innovation as their new model of innovation since it seems merely impossible for them to bear the whole innovation process and the risks along the process on their own. Firm capacities, representing a firm‘s strength during the innovation process, are important factors which do affect firms‘ innovation performances under the open innovation background. O n the other hand, environmental turbulence also plays an important role on the realization of one firm‘s capacities.Based on a fully study and review of extant literatures about open innovation, in the light of Ulrich Lichtenthaler‘s capability-based framework for open innovation, according to its definition of firm capacities on organizational level( i.e. inventive capacity, transformative capacity, innovative capacity, absorptive capacity, connective capacity and desorptive capacity), this study takes technology based SMEs as the object of research, builds up an integrated research model in the perspective of innovation process and considering the moderating fact of environmental turbulence. Though a way of empirical study, this paper identifies three different capacity types of the sample data and their different performances on innovation accordingly as well as explains the mechanism of how technology based SMEs‘ capacities affect their innovation performances. The results show that technology based SMEs‘ firm capacities have different and also significant positive effect on their innovation performances; Environmental turbulences have significant positive moderating effect on the relationship between external capacities and innovation performances and those technology based SMEs who have different capacity types tend to have significant differences on their innovation performances.This study takes technology based SMEs as research object, aiming at variables such as firm capacity, capacity types, environmental turbulences, innovation performances and their inner relationships, forms an integrated research model and examines the hypnosis of the research, therefore, opens up the black box of open innovation, enriches the connotation of the theory and fills its blank, also makes contributions to the fully development of the open innovation theory. On the other hand, this research also points out a possible way from fostering firm‘s capacities, building up suitable capacity types under different environment to elevating its innovation performance therefore enhance its competitiveness for firms to refer in the managerial practice. |
