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| The Impact of Network Structural Embeddedness on Radical Innovation Performance:The Evidence from the Listed Biopharmaceutical Enterprises |
| Shao Yunfei,Xie Li |
| (School of Management and Economics, University of Electronic Science and Technology, Chengdu 611731,China) |
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Abstract The lack of core technologies remains the major development bottleneck for China.Therefore,it is imperative to promote radical innovation to strengthen the originality and leading research.Enterprises are key subjects of innovation and responsible for serving the major needs of the country and it is of great practical significance to explore the radical innovation performance of enterprises for China's innovation development.Existing studies generally agree that structural embedding can provide an advantage for firms to obtain innovation resources from external agents, and thus have an impact on their innovation performance.These studies focus on the relationship between structural embedding and innovation performance of firms, while radical innovation is different from conventional innovation and relies more on acquiring innovation resources from collaborative networks for its high risk and novelty characteristics, but there is a lack of existing studies that explore its impact on radical innovation performance from the perspective of structural embedding, and the mechanism between them needs to be further clarified.#br#Therefore, focusing on radical innovation,this study deconstructs the structural embedding variable based on social network theory, divides it into centrality and structural holes, and explores the impact of structural embedding on the radical innovation performance of enterprises.By using the invention patent data of listed companies in the biopharmaceutical industry from 2000 to 2020, an empirical study is conducted using a 5-year moving window to construct a corporate partnership network.In addition, although structural embedding provides a locational advantage for firms to access heterogeneous resources, which in turn brings many benefits to firms' radical innovation performance, the strength of relationship between innovation networks members and the small-world nature of the overall network characteristics has an impact on the quality, type, and cost of firms' access to resources, which may result in different levels of radical innovation performance.Therefore,relationship strength and small-worldness are taken as the moderating factors in the research framework.#br#The research results show the inverted U-shaped relationship between centrality and radical innovation performance.A large number of direct partners are not conducive to radical innovation performance, and when the number of direct partners exceeds a certain threshold, the company cannot integrate the resources shared by many partners well due to its own limited absorption capacity, and also consumes a lot of management costs.Relationship strength weakens the inverted U-effect between centrality and radical innovation performance.When a company maintains a moderate number of direct partners, the company shares resources from partners to compensate for its own resource limitations, which in turn promotes radical innovation performance.However, if a firm continues to cooperate with a fixed partner, the knowledge, technology and other innovation resources exchanged with the two partners will gradually become redundant as the cooperation increases, thus weakening the role of centrality in promoting radical innovation performance.In contrast, the speed of diffusion and spread of innovation resources in a small-world network is enhanced, which reduces the loss caused by intermediate transmission links, avoids distortion of resource transmission, and improves the efficiency of resource transfers, thus enhancing the role of centrality in promoting the radical innovation performance of enterprises.In addition, companies in the structural hole can access non-redundant innovation resources in the network by contacting partners who are separated from each other, thus realizing the intersection of multiple knowledge domains, and the collision of different knowledge domains is conducive to generating radical ideas and enhancing radical innovation performance.As these heterogeneous knowledges is at a large distance from the company's original knowledge, the high level of relationship strength helps the company to absorb and digest the heterogeneous knowledge and other resources acquired by the structural hole, thus strengthening the facilitating relationship between the structural hole and radical innovation performance.Small-worldness accelerates the speed of acquiring heterogeneous resources from structural holes, which induces knowledge "indigestion" and makes it more difficult for companies to integrate these heterogeneous resources, thus weakening the role of structural holes in promoting radical innovation performance.#br#This study explores the influencing factors of radical innovation performance from the perspective of structural embedding with redefined variables.It reconciles the paradox of structural embedding paradox and helps to further understand the relationship between centrality and radical innovation performance.#br#
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Received: 11 April 2022
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