Study On The R&D Collaborated Innovation Network And Influencing Factors On Its Evolution

Innovation is the key factor to keep countries and companies to be in the leading positon and have sustainable development in this competition-globalized world. Nowadays, it makes one company hard to innovate because of the increasingly intense market competition, the increasingly fast product update and the increasingly complicated technical innovation. To increase the effectivity of innovation, decrease the time of innovation, lower the cost of innovation and share the risk of innovation, the traditional linear way of innovation has become the way of network innovation, and more and more companies choose to innovate by collaboration. So how to initiate innovation collaboration, to make sure that this collaboration to continue has gained attention in theory researches and empirical studies.Among the researches existed so far, the motivation/type/form of research collaboration innovation, the risk/profit distribution/cost of innovation collaboration, the figures as well as its influences on the performance of innovation, the stability of the network, the evolution route of the innovation network have been massively done to the collaborated innovation(network). However, the research on the influencing factors or the rules of evolution of R&D collaboration network has been poorly done. The research collaboration innovation network is a network that always changes through different innovation processes and developments. So, the study on the influencing factors and the rules of this network evolution is very important to keep the collaborated innovation moving on in the respects of theory and empirical study.This thesis compares the R&D collaboration innovation network to the social network, thinking that R&D innovation network can be seen as a specialized social network. So, some of the analysis is based on part of the social network theory. High technique, high investment, high risk, high return and long period are the characteristics of bio-pharmaceutical industry. And compared with other high-technique industries, it has higher access threshold, and a lot of different domains are involved in. These determine that R&D collaboration is the most suitable way for this industry to innovate, and its collaboration network should be representative. Thus, we take the actor-oriented dynamic network approach which is a social network model to apply on the collaboration network of bio-pharmaceutical industry to test the influencing factors on its evolution. The main contents of this article include:R&D collaboration innovation network is dynamic, open and imbalanced; this sets the foundation for the research on the influencing factors of its evolution. R&D collaboration network can be seen as a specialized social network, so it's been thought that transitivity, geography proximity, organizational proximity and absorptive capacity will have an influence on its evolution based on social network theory. And according to the analysis above, four hypothesizes have been raised considering the influencing factors on R&D collaboration network evolution.The characteristics of technical innovation in Bio-pharmaceutical industry and the current situation of it have been described, thus lead to the empirical study below.We test these hypothesizes in bio-pharmaceutical industry by actor-based dynamic network approach based on the data of shared patent applications. Therefore, we come with a conclusion that transitivity, geography proximity and absorptive capacity have positive and remarkable influences on the behavior of R&D collaboration; organizational proximity has a negative but unremarkable influence on this behavior.Coming from the empirical study, some suggestions have been raised to improve the performance of R&D collaboration network in bio-pharmaceutical industry. To encourage and guarantee the R&D collaboration among the innovation actors by the establishment of certain regulations, thus to intensify the density of the collaboration network; to enhance the construction of industrial clusters, making it easier for innovation actors to communicate and learn; to build the bio-pharmaceutical innovated information platform to lower the opportunism risk and make the information of the collaborated partners easier to achieve; encourage the companies to collaborated with universities and research department; to enhance the protection of intellectual property of the innovation actors, improve the absorptive capacity of the innovation subjects therefore to guarantee and promote the R&D collaboration among them.