| dc.description.abstract | In the knowledge economic, research and development (R&D) innovation becomes critical to organizational strategy for building sustainable competitive advantages. Investment in R&D innovation activities is also a key contributing factor to economic growth in all countries. Since enterprises must consider the overall dynamic environment constructed by external market conditions, how to manage R&D resources effectively to establish corporate innovative capability and national competitive advantages is an important issue that practitioners cannot afford to overlook. Previous studies have pointed out the relationship between R&D innovation activities and competitive advantages. However, they neglected the interactive effects of these activities in different organizational contexts, and thus could not thoroughly evaluate their impact on the overall performance of the innovation network. Hence, this study employed microscopic and macroscopic analysis to investigate the innovation network interconnected by different actors under intra-organizational, inter-organizational and country contexts, and further examined the relative impact of network interaction on knowledge diffusion and innovation performances from a cross-level perspective.
At the micro-level analysis, this study took the resource-based view to analyze how inter- and intra-organizational knowledge networks affect the innovation performance of the firm. This study also took the inter-organizational innovation activities as an example to analyze how the collaboration network with supply chain partners affects green innovation from the social capital perspective. In addition, this study also made the cross-level study on the intra-organizational innovation activities to examine the ways in which social capital constitutes individuals’ or organizational factors for creating innovation value for a wide range of organizational phenomena, and further investigates the relationship between information sharing, group cohesion and innovation performance. At the macro-level analysis, this study took the competition perspective to analyze the influence of the national innovation network on the competitive advantages across the country. We constructed a three-stage R&D production framework by actor-network theory that emphasizes the linking activities between the basic research stage, technology translation stage, and system development stage. By using the network data envelopment analysis method, this study evaluated relative R&D efficiency across twenty-five countries.
The empirical results are as follows. At the micro-level analysis, the social capital approach of this study can be considered as resources for companies, which leads to a new paradigm for business strategies. In the intra-organizational innovation phenomena, the overall configuration of the network ties constitutes an important aspect of social structure and significantly facilitates the sharing of information between team members. Furthermore, another factor affecting team innovation performance through the effects of individual’s perceived social capital was shared vision. In the inter-organizational innovation phenomena, the three kinds of social capitals, structural, relational and cognitive capital, had significant effects on knowledge sharing regarding green management. Companies should leverage their social capital in order to produce additional competitive advantages through environmental collaboration. With the macro-level analysis, the increase in a country’s overall level of R&D efficiency leads to corresponding increases in its competitive advantage. The actor-network theory approach of this study could help each country access the relative R&D efficiency to identify the transformation of innovation context in which actors get involved. The results of this study also screened out specialized efficient countries at each sub-process and further constructed the efficiency group for benchmark learning.
Through empirical analysis of the multidimensional factors of R&D innovation in cross-level contexts, this study enhanced understanding of the relative impact of network interaction on innovation performance. At the micro-level analysis, this study identified the characteristics of organizations that adopt innovation management from the resource-based view. Unlike many other empirical studies, this study made an important contribution to the literature by examining how social capital embedded in the intra-organizational and inter-organizational relationships affects innovation in a detailed manner. At the macro-level analysis, this study enhances understanding of the characterization of the divisional efficiencies of the innovation system that emphasizes the effect of linking activities by an actor-network theory approach. Additionally, this study further provided managerial implications for R&D resource allocation strategies and the government’s industrial policy. | en_US |