The Research On The Relationship Among Open Innovation, Incremental Innovation Performance And Competitive Advantage

In the era of globalization, the innovation opening degree of firms becomes more and more obvious. To some extent any firm gains innovation performance, establishes competitive advantage lies on the open innovation. Therefore, open innovation, innovation performance and competitive advantage are in a causation relationship. With the enhancement of innovation performance and competitive advantage, firm becomes larger, which requires formalization to adjust to the change. However, formalization often becomes an obstacle to innovation performance and competitive advantage of firm, which is a current innovation predicament to Chinese firms. Nowadays, both academic and practice fields have not paid much attention to the causation relationship among open innovation, innovation performance and competitive advantage, as well as the mechanism of formalization. Because of this kind of background, this paper builds a conceptual model of the relationship among inbound and outbound open innovation, incremental innovation performance, competitive advantage and formalization basing on the context of Chinese firms, trying to reveal the mechanism of inbound and outbound open innovation, incremental innovation performance, competitive advantage and formalization.This paper makes a comprehensive analysis on the relationship among inbound and outbound open innovation, incremental innovation performance, competitive advantage and formalization by research methods including questionnaire and literature review, as well as analysis instruments including SPSS22.0 and AMOS22.0. The following conclusions are reached in this study:(1) Inbound and outbound open innovation has significantly positive influence on competitive advantage. Both input and output of knowledge and technology, firm can improve its technology, product and market position in the industry.(2) Incremental innovation performance plays a part of the intermediary role between inbound and outbound open innovation and competitive advantage. Firm establishes competitive advantage through inbound and outbound open innovation partly depends on incremental innovation performance.(3) Formalization has negative control response on the relationship between inbound open innovation and incremental innovation. The higher formalization is, the weaker the inbound open innovation effects incremental innovation performance, which inhibits the promoting effect of competitive advantage.Based on the research conclusions, this paper gives advice on the innovation management of firm, which includes building open innovation platform, speeding up the integration of internal and external knowledge, and establishing management mechanism that matches firm’s innovation. Theoretically, the paper promotes the theoretical research on open innovation of Chinese firms. Practically, this paper is helpful to deepen the understanding of open innovation, and change the way of thinking on establishment of firm’s competitive advantage.