Empirical Research On Process Innovation In China’s Automobile Enterprises

Recently, China’s automobile production and sales maintained rapid growth, making China a veritable biggest automobile producer while most automobile enterprises are still facing problems like low product quality and production efficiency, which are closely related to the poor process innovation capacity. However, it’s quite a common phenomenon that enterprises pay highly attention to product innovation while ignore process innovation. Meanwhile, state funded projects are mainly about product innovation rather than process innovation. Whether and how an enterprise implements process innovation depends on its process innovation mechanism, but most enterprises haven’t found one and academic research in this field is deficient. Therefore, it’s necessary to take a deep study of the issue by integrating related theory and taking actual production situation into account. Not only does this paper help enrich technology innovation research, but also it guide China’s automobile enterprises improve their process innovation capacity.Based on literature research and expert interviews, this paper analyses process innovation mechanism in China’s automobile enterprises, builds a theoretical model and raises several hypothesis. The data comes from questionnaire investigation and is processed with structural equation modeling, during which the theoretical model is modified. Afterwards, this paper verifies the empirical research result by analysing the actual process innovation mechanism of Dongfeng Motor Corporation Passenger Vehicle Company. Finally, this paper puts forward suggestions for enterprises to improve their process innovation capacity based on the research above.Followed are the main conclusions of this paper. Process innovation mechanism can be decomposed into decision-making mechanism, motive mechanism, organizational mechanism and incentive mechanism, the interaction among whom helps to improve process innovation capacity of the enterprises. The decision-making mechanism plays a core role, influencing other mechanisms but for some reason it doesn’t show a direct influence on process innovation capacity. Both motive mechanism and organizational mechanism have a direct impact on process innovation capacity while the effect of motive mechanism is inferior to organizational mechanism. Besides, incentive mechanism doesn’t show an effect on process innovation capacity.This paper put forward some suggestions for enterprises. First of all, the importance of process innovation must be recognized and valued. Secondly, there should be a specialized organization responsible for improving process innovation capacity by concentrating on relative research and promoting communication among different organizations. Finally, enterprises should also pay attention to cooperation with other enterprises and institutions, helping improve China’s process innovation capacity.