The impact of competition strength and density on performance: The technological competition networks in the wind energy industry

Abstract

Technological competition plays an important role in technological development and innovation. However, technological competition networks have long been ignored in research. Based on the social network theory, we proposed that the innovation of an organization is greatly affected by the technological competition networks that it is embedded in. We introduced International Patent Classifications (IPCs) information to construct technological competition networks of organizations, and explored how competition network characteristics influence the organizational competitive capability and innovation performance.Based on the wind energy patent data between 2005 and 2014, we synthetically investigated the technological development and competition networks in the industry. Our findings show that (1) the evolutionary trends of patents and technology elements growth exhibit similar patterns (i.e., increasing before 2011 and decreasing after 2011); (2) the burst detection algorithm detects that 140 technological elements and 132 organizations experienced a sudden growth in production; (3) wind energy organizations intensively compete with each other, and in each year, only 10% of organizations can improve their technological competitive positions in the following year; (4) competition density in a competition network increases the technological competitive capability and innovation performance of firms. Additionally, competition strength has an inverted-U shaped relationship with both the aforementioned outcomes.