Research On The Relationship Among Inventor’s Collaboration Network,Diversity Of Technological Knowledge Base And Ambidextrous Innovation

As China’s scientific and technological strength continues to grow,the United States has imposed a series of technology controls on China,leading to a number of “stuck neck” crises in China’s key core areas.Therefore,it is a major national need to promote ambidextrous innovation to maintain existing competitive advantages,strengthen originality and thereby break through the dilemma of external technological containment.And as important innovation subjects,enterprises bear the responsibility of serving major national needs.Under this background,enterprises explore the ambidextrous innovation,which has significant practical implications for promoting innovation in China.Since the impact of collaboration network on ambidextrous innovation has been examined by previous studies from the perspective of organization-wide,few scholars have discussed it from an inventor’s perspective.As a key player in the innovation behavior by firms,the different positions of inventors in the collaboration network will influence the firm’s technological innovation.Thus,it is worthwhile to explore the theoretical issue of how exactly inventor collaboration network affect the implementation of ambidextrous innovation behavior by firms.Based on knowledge base theory and social network theory,this paper constructs a theoretical model of inventor cooperation network,technological knowledge base variety and knowledge network embeddedness affecting enterprise ambidextrous innovation,and then puts forward a series of hypotheses.This article attempts to uncover the ‘black box’ of the relationship between the inventor collaboration network and the firm’s ambidextrous innovation,revealing the mediating role of the technological knowledge base variety and the moderating role of the knowledge network embeddedness.This paper selects 36935 patents in the field of artificial intelligence between 2008 and 2017 as the research sample and draws the following conclusions through empirical research.The relationship between collaboration network(structural hole and centrality)and ambidextrous innovation presents an inverted Ushaped.Technological knowledge base variety is a mediating role in the impact on structural hole and centrality in inventor collaboration network on ambidextrous innovation,but it can not act as an intermediary between inventor collaboration networks and exploratory innovation.For the inverted U-shaped relationships between the centrality of inventor collaboration network and the related variety of technological knowledge base,or between inventor collaboration network structure hole and the variety of technological knowledge base,each of them can be positively moderated by Knowledge network structure hole,but has no significant moderating effect on inventor collaboration network centrality and the unrelated variety of technological knowledge base.The knowledge network centrality negatively moderates an inverted U-shaped relationship between the inventor collaboration network centrality and the related variety of technological knowledge base,and negatively moderates the inverted U-shaped relationship between the inventor collaboration network structural hole and the variety of technological knowledge base,but has no significant moderating effect on inventor collaboration network centrality and the related variety of technological knowledge base.The findings of this paper not only further refine the role of inventor collaboration network in influencing ambidextrous innovation,but also incorporate technological knowledge base variety and knowledge network structural embeddedness into the theoretical framework,to a certain extent bridging the gaps in existing research.In addition,the findings of this paper provide useful lessons for firms using collaboration network of inventors to improve their ambidextrous innovation capabilities.