Abstract
Improving enterprise innovation performance is key for enterprises to obtain sustainable competitiveness. With the increasingly fierce market competition of technological and product innovation, acquiring external heterogeneous knowledge of alliance enterprises becomes core to improving innovation performance. In this paper, we constructed a theoretical model to present the effect of inter-enterprise knowledge heterogeneity and alliance network governance mechanisms on enterprise innovation performance. We selected high-tech enterprises as the research object for empirical research and reached the following conclusions: (1) Inter-enterprise knowledge heterogeneity has a positive effect on exploratory and exploitative innovation performance, and (2) trust and contract have a moderating effect on the relationship between inter-enterprise knowledge heterogeneity and enterprise innovation performance.
Highlights
Technological innovation ability is a key factor in acquiring sustained competitiveness for an enterprise
The influence of inter-firm heterogeneous knowledge and the R&D alliance governance mechanism on enterprise innovation performance has attracted the attention of many scholars
We define innovation performance as two dimensions of exploratory innovation performance and exploitative innovation, which refer to the scale created or revised by Jensen (2006) [42]; Lubatkin, Simsek, Ling et al (2006) [43], Benner and Tushman (2008) [44], Li and Atuahene (2011) [45]
Summary
Technological innovation ability is a key factor in acquiring sustained competitiveness for an enterprise. The realization of enterprise innovation needs effective access to acquire external heterogeneous knowledge. It needs contingency governance mechanisms of alliance networks to realize an effective absorption and integration of heterogeneous knowledge, thereby improving enterprise innovation performance. The influence of inter-firm heterogeneous knowledge and the R&D alliance governance mechanism on enterprise innovation performance has attracted the attention of many scholars. Some scholars proposed that heterogeneous knowledge can promote enterprise innovation performance due to the scale economy and sharing effect (Subramaniam, 2005; Suzuki, 2004) [1,2]. Some scholars believe that heterogeneous knowledge negatively affects innovation because it produces conflicts and is difficult to transfer and absorb (Tanriverdi & Venkatraman, 2005; Lin, 2005) [3,4]. Considering the benefits and costs of heterogeneous knowledge on innovation, some scholars have verified the non-linear relationship between heterogeneous knowledge and innovation with an inverted U function (Sampson, 2007; Oerlemans, 2013; Ye J.F., Hao B., etc., 2016) [5,6,7]
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