An Empirical Study Of The Impact Of Multidimensional Network Embeddedness On Firms’ Ambidextrous Innovation Performance

As the process of technological iteration accelerates and technological complexity and R&D uncertainty increase,individual firms are no longer able to meet the resource demands of large-scale innovation,and different forms of inter-organizational cooperation become a key way for firms to effectively access the resources they need to innovate.In a dynamic competitive environment,firms need to balance exploratory innovation,which brings them long-term benefits,with exploitative innovation,which achieves short-term profitability.How to leverage inter-organizational cooperation networks to enhance ambidextrous innovation performance has become an important issue of concern for both business and academia.Most of the existing literature has considered the structural and/or relational dimensions of network embeddedness on firms’ ambidextrous innovation performance,while few literature has considered the cognitive dimensions of network embeddedness on firms’ ambidextrous innovation performance.Furthermore,the resources and knowledge acquired by firms using network embeddedness need to be absorbed,digested,transformed,and applied by them,but most of the literature does not consider the mediating role played by absorptive capacity between network embeddedness and ambidextrous innovation performance.Furthermore,the impact of network embeddedness on a firm’s ambidextrous innovation performance may be influenced by its level of knowledge diversity,but no study has considered the moderating role that knowledge diversity plays in the impact of network embeddedness on a firm’s ambidextrous innovation performance.This study examines the impact of multidimensional network embeddedness on firms’ ambidextrous innovation performance,aiming to answer the following questions:(1)How do structural embeddedness,relational embeddedness,and cognitive embeddedness affect exploratory innovation performance and exploitative innovation performance?(2)Does absorptive capacity play a mediating role between multidimensional network embeddedness and a firm’s ambidextrous innovation performance?(3)Does knowledge diversity moderate the relationship between multidimensional network embeddedness and ambidextrous innovation performance? To answer these questions,this study constructs a theoretical model of the impact of multidimensional network embeddedness on firms’ ambidextrous innovation performance based on network embeddedness theory,with absorptive capacity as a mediating variable and knowledge diversity as a moderating variable.This study used panel data of 97 listed companies in the Chinese communications industry from 2007 to 2021 based on matching the sample companies between the Zhihuiya Global Patent Database and the Wind database.The empirical findings revealed that(1)structural embeddedness,relational embeddedness,and cognitive embeddedness positively influence exploratory innovation performance.Structural embeddedness positively affects exploitative innovation performance,but relational embeddedness and cognitive embeddedness negatively affect exploitative innovation performance.(2)Absorptive capacity mediates the relationship between multi-dimensional network embeddedness and ambidextrous innovation performance,i.e.multi-dimensional network embeddedness affects ambidextrous innovation performance through absorptive capacity.(3)Knowledge diversity weakens the positive effect of structural embeddedness on ambidextrous innovation performance.Knowledge diversity weakens the positive effect of relational embeddedness and cognitive embeddedness on exploratory innovation performance.Knowledge diversity weakens the negative effect of relational embeddedness and cognitive embeddedness on exploitative innovation performance.This study comprehensively examines the impact of different dimensions of network embeddedness on firms’ ambidextrous innovation performance,and further analyses the channels through which multidimensional network embeddedness affects firms’ ambidextrous innovation performance as well as the boundary conditions.This study contributes to the literature on network embeddedness theory and the ambidextrous innovation performance of firms,and has important implications for firms to improve their ambidextrous innovation performance.