Social interdependencies as facilitators of cooperative learning in new product development: The moderating effect of technological novelty

Abstract

As automobile manufacturing firms often outsource third-party designers to produce key innovative components, the suppliers of these third-party designers must be capable of collaborative innovation through cooperative learning in today's changing technology and customers’ demands. However, research has rarely investigated how suppliers’ relationships - specifically, the mutual dependence among suppliers - can be leveraged to enhance cooperative learning and thus the final product quality. This research draws on social interdependence theory to examine the associations between two main types of interdependence (task and resources) and cooperative learning under different levels of technology novelty conditions. Based on data collected from automobile parts suppliers in China, the results indicate that resource and task interdependence were positively associated with cooperative learning. However, high task interdependence is unfavorable under high technological novelty; whereas, resource interdependence is a key driver of inter-organizational learning under higher levels of technological novelty. The results of this study have significant theoretical and implications for researchers and designers to nurture suppliers’ cooperative learning capabilities under diverse technology novelty conditions.