| With the increasingly tricky international situation and complex,competitive dynamics,especially the drastic impact of unfavorable events such as China-US trade friction and the Russia-Ukraine war,the exogenous nature of China’s strategic opportunities is diminishing,and how Chinese enterprises can achieve development through innovation has become an important issue for their strategic decisions.At present,the independent innovation ability of Chinese companies still needs to improve.Relying only on their own resource endowment and following the traditional innovation model,it will be difficult for them to cope with the changes in the external environment and face the risk of being eliminated from the market.Therefore,more and more enterprises have established different ways of innovation cooperation with external organizations,and building or participating in an innovation ecosystem has become a strategic choice for more and more enterprises.As a new organizational cooperation structure,the innovation ecosystem provides a haven and habitat for firms to gain competitive advantage and protect themselves from innovation risks.However,there are certain theoretical gaps in what impact innovation ecosystems will have on non-core firms,what mechanisms innovation ecosystems promote innovation in noncore firms,and what boundary conditions they are subject to,which need to be explored in depth.Based on this,this study takes the innovation ecosystem as the research scenario and non-core firms as the research object and converts the research questions into scientific hypotheses.It constructs the research framework of “innovation ecoembeddedness--strategic flexibility--innovation performance” using SPSS software to test the regression equation of 354 ecological non-core firms in China.The paper empirically explores the impact of innovation eco-embeddedness on innovation performance and the role of strategic flexibility and eco-legitimacy.The following research conclusions were as follows.(1)Eco-embeddedness position and eco-embeddedness relation both have significant positive effects on the innovation performance of non-core firms.That is,the more favorable the eco-embeddedness position of non-core firms,the more external ecological resources they connect with,the stronger the complementary relationship with ecological cooperating firms,and the more they help improve innovation performance.(2)Strategic flexibility partially mediates in both ecoembeddedness position and eco-embeddedness relation affecting innovation performance of non-core enterprises.Specifically,the diversified resources and complementary assets acquired by non-core firms in the ecology not only directly provide resource support and cooperation opportunities for enterprise innovation,but also indirectly contribute to improving innovation performance by enhancing the strategic flexibility of enterprises.(3)Ecological legitimacy plays a moderating role in the process that both the eco-embeddedness position and the eco-embeddedness relation affect the firm’s strategic flexibility,i.e.,the higher the ecological legitimacy obtained by non-core firms,the more it helps to improve strategic flexibility.(4)Both environmental dynamics and environmental competitiveness positively mediate in strategic flexibility affecting the innovation performance of non-core firms.Specifically,the rich and versatile resources and flexible,dynamic ability of strategic flexibility facilitate non-core firms to adjust their internal resources and practices within a short period in response to dynamic environmental changes and intensified competition and provide a guarantee for non-core firms to develop new products and technologies.To sum up,by reviewing the research basis,theoretical analysis,and logical deduction at home and abroad,as well as empirical research and analysis,this paper reveals the complex process mechanism of improving the innovation performance of ecological non-core firms.The research provides a theoretical basis and practical guidance for Chinese enterprises to promote innovation and achieve growth using eco-embeddedness,which is of great significance for promoting Chinese firms to carry out joint innovation to improve innovation ability and obtain innovation performance. |
