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| The Relationship among Inventor Network Characteristics, Knowledge Reorganization and Enterprise Technological Innovation Performance |
| Zhu Jinwei,Yuan Meng |
| (School of Business, Jiangnan University, Wuxi 214000, China) |
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Abstract To cope with the complex innovation environment in the knowledge economy, more and more innovation subjects break through the traditional communication boundaries and conduct knowledge creation, acquisition, absorption, and diffusion based on social networks to enhance their technological innovation capabilities. However, the inner influence mechanism of social relations and networks constituted by different subjects on technological innovation is not yet clear. Recent studies have focused on how inventors can enhance the innovation performance of individuals or organizations through collaborative innovation networks. Inventors are not only the main force of organizational innovation, but also the leaders of industry technology development. The improvement of inventors' technological innovation efficiency means the enhancement of organizational and industry R&D capability, and as the dynamic subject of knowledge creation, integration and use, the collaborative network of inventors within an enterprise can promote the exchange between individuals and improve the efficiency of production factors, thus forming the sustainable competitive advantage of the enterprise. How to improve the technological innovation performance of enterprises through an inter-organizational inventor cooperation network has become a hot topic of research in academia and enterprise management nowadays.#br#Therefore, this paper focuses on the inventor network within an organization to investigate the impact of inventor network characteristics on the technological innovation performance of a firm and the mechanisms through which this impact is realized. As the main carriers of innovation output, inventors' knowledge, experience and capability are important elements for knowledge reorganization, while the network relationship among inventors is an important medium for knowledge dissemination and a resource base for knowledge search and knowledge reorganization. The inventor networks with different structural relationships and their nodes will extend and improve the existing knowledge base for the exchange, transfer and interaction of different information resources, and finally realize technological innovation behaviors by enhancing and accelerating the overall knowledge reorganization efficiency of enterprises. Therefore, this paper introduces knowledge reorganization as a "bridge" between the inventor network and enterprise technology innovation performance, and it starts from the inventor network formed by the cooperative research and development of inventors within the organization, and takes enterprise technology innovation performance as the foothold, along the "resource-action-result" research paradigm based on social network theory and knowledge-based theory to build a mechanism model for inventor network characteristics to drive innovation performance through knowledge reorganization. In addition, following the theory of collaborative innovation, this paper introduces collaborative R&D to cope with complex innovation, as a weighting factor, to improve and deepen the inventor network relationship model, and provide a reference for enterprises to build networks.#br#The listed companies in the automobile manufacturing industry with high R&D investment and relatively stable R&D team structures are selected as research objects with 103 sample enterprises, involving 16 519 patents. To test the hypothesis, this paper adopts a stochastic negative binomial regression model to analyze the results of the study, which show that the construction of an internal inventor network with high overall clustering coefficients and a long average path length helps to form a small R&D team with diversified and heterogeneous resources, thus improving the technological innovation performance of enterprises. Both reuse of knowledge reorganization and creation of knowledge reorganization play a mediating role between inventor network characteristics and firms' technological innovation performance. Collaborative R&D partially moderates the positive effect of knowledge reorganization on firm technological innovation performance.#br#This paper converts the intangible knowledge exchange into tangible network construction and reveals the "black box" between inventor network characteristics and enterprise technological innovation performance in the context of collaborative innovation.It not only extends the influence of interaction results from the individual inventor level to the enterprise level based on social network theory and enriches the scope of social network research, but also reveals the role mechanism of inventor network on the technological innovation performance of enterprises from the perspective of knowledge reorganization, and deeply explores how to make knowledge elements more efficiently transformed into technological outputs and shape the knowledge combination ability into core competitiveness. The research results have certain significance for the improvement and optimization of enterprise knowledge management activities.#br#
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Received: 09 May 2022
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