| Since China implemented its reform and open policy, China’s economy has successfully narrowed the gap between it and the developed countries. However, most Chinese firms’ technological capabilities still fall behind the leading firms in developed countries, and Chinese firms need to speed up the process of technological catching-up. The technological catching-up of firms essentially lies in technological innovation. Extant studies have documented that searching external knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, matters for firms’ technological innovation. Along with the development of science and technology of China in recent years, the University-Industry(U-I) interaction between firms, universities and research institutes creates the opportunity for firms to search scientific knowledge via the U-I linkages. How Chinese firms search scientific knowledge via the U-I linkages could improve their technological capabilities? The present study attempts to answer this question.Drawing on a unique U-I interaction practice- the Technological Expert Secondment Program of Guangdong, China, this study uses 204 firms in four high-tech manufacturing industries as the research sample. This study investigates firms’ knowledge search strategies in scientific fields on two dimensions, search breadth and search depth, and explores how firms’ scientific knowledge search strategies could influence their technological innovation at different level of novelty. Accordingly, the descriptive research and explanatory research have been carried out. The results of descriptive research manifest the characteristics and differences of scientific knowledge search breadth and depth at the industry level and the firm level. To test the hypothesis, negative binominal regression has been applied in the explanatory research. The empirical results show that when firms search deeply in scientific fields as well as interact intensively with excellent universities or/and research institutes, they can generate more, as well as more novel technological innovation. |
