In the era of "New Normal" with VUCA characteristics,how to enhance resilience has become the key for enterprises to avoid dangers and shift into safety and achieve sustainable development. As a strategic choice for knowledge expansion, technological diversification is beneficial for enterprises to diversify external risks, improve their perception and adaptability to the environment and then achieve resilient growth. Although existing research pays attention to the effect of technological diversification on enterprise resilience, the "bridge" between the two needs to be further explored. Continuous innovation related to operational efficiency and strategic flexibility is an important ability to achieve continuous development. According to the theoretical logic of "resource-capability-result", continuous innovation drives enterprises to change their mindset, continuously breaking through development bottlenecks and exploring new growth paths through the integration of diversified technologies. Therefore, continuous innovation may play a mediating role between technological diversification and enterprise resilience. In addition, the results of technological diversification depend on the combination of internal technological exploration and external technological relationships, making enterprises embedded in dual network relationships. In particular, the density of internal collaboration network characterizes the close relationship between internal inventors, which directly affects the effective transfer of diversified technological knowledge and information sharing; the heterogeneous resource advantages brought by the high degree of external collaboration network centrality can effectively alleviate the dilemma of knowledge homogenization in high-density internal cooperative networks, and then accelerate the process of diversified technological development and integration. However, existing research has not focused on the boundary effects of dual networks on the relationship between technological diversification and continuous innovation. Hence, this study aims to explore the internal mechanism between technological diversification and enterprise resilience, and investigate the boundary effect of internal collaboration network density and the three-way moderating effect of external collaboration network centrality from the perspective of dual network.
Following the resource-based theory and the theoretical logic of "resource-capability-result", this study conducts the empirical analysis using a sample of Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed enterprises in the new energy automobile industry. The resilience and control variables information of these enterprises is collected from CSMAR and patent data is collected from Incopat. Finally, an unbalanced panel dataset of 285 enterprises from 2010 to 2021 is constructed. The hypotheses are tested by the individual and time-fixed effect models using Stata 15.0.
The results show that (1) there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between technological diversification and enterprise resilience; (2) continuous innovation plays the mediating role in the inverted U-shaped relationship between technological diversity and enterprise resilience; (3) internal collaboration network density negatively moderates the relationship between technological diversification and continuous innovation; (4) external collaboration network centrality further mitigates the negative impact of internal collaboration network density on the relationship between overall technological diversification, unrelated technological diversification, and continuous innovation.
The theoretical contributions of the study are as follows: firstly,it clarifies the relationship between technological diversification and enterprise resilience in the context of a long-term and turbulent environment, and expands the theoretical space of technological diversification and enterprise resilience; secondly,the paper provides empirical evidence for the effect of continuous innovation on enterprise resilience and bridges the gap in the discussion of mechanisms underlying technological diversification and enterprise resilience; finally, from the perspective of dual network,it reveals the boundary effects of dual networks in the relationship between technological diversification and continuous innovation, and deepens the contextual mechanism for the transformation of technological diversification into continuous innovation. The practical contributions are proposed. Enterprises should first cultivate internal skills and moderately expand diversified technology fields based on risk assessment. Then it is necessary to seek change proactively. Enterprises should cultivate continuous innovation ability to leverage the positive effects of technological diversification on enterprise resilience. Finally, enterprise should pay attention to collaboration,encourage inventors to "go out", maintain loose partnerships internally and build a wide collaborative R&D network externally.