研发人员专业异质性与合作稳定性对企业二元创新平衡的影响

The Influence of R&D Employees'Expertise Diversity and Cooperation Stability on Firm Ambidexterity

二元创新平衡指企业同时从事探索式创新与挖掘式创新,探索式创新是企业长期竞争力的保障,挖掘式创新是企业从当前技术中赢利的保障,实现二元创新平衡对企业生存与发展有重要的意义。高效的学习有利于挖掘式创新,而多样化知识有助于探索式创新,研发人员的组织将影响企业同时实现高效学习与多样化知识的获取。基于四个高科技行业中76家企业的专利数据分析,发现研发人员合作稳定性促进企业二元创新平衡;企业内部合作网络程度中心势负向调节研发人员专业异质性和二元平衡间的关系。研究结论深化了企业研发人员管理与二元创新平衡理论,并就企业研发人员的组织管理实践提出了建议。

Ambidexterity means that a firm is engaged in both exploratory and exploitative innovation.Exploratory innovation helps the long-term competitiveness of firms,and exploitative innovation gets profit from existed technology.Thus,being ambidexterity has great significance for the survival and development of firms.Previous studies have found that efficient learning is required for exploitative innovation,and diverse knowledge is necessary for exploratory innovation.Organizing R&D employees matters with learning efficiency and diversified knowledge utility.However,in studies exploring the antecedents of firm ambidexterity,few of them involve the impact of organization and management of R&D employees on it.This article builds a research model of R&D employees'expertise diversity,cooperation stability and co-invention network structure characteristic to firm ambidexterity.R&D employees'expertise diversity and cooperation stability are the predict variables,and the degree centralization of co-invention network is the moderator variable.We choose 76 firms with the largest number of patents for inventions in four high-tech industries(ICT,3D printing technology,wind energy and lithium batteries)as the sample.They came from China,United States,Japan and other countries.After collecting 26137 patent data in Derwent patent index database from 1992 to 2013,we build 790 intra-firm co-invention networks and extract R&D employees'expertise diversity,cooperation stability and the degree centralization of co-invention network.Then we use"exploratory innovation/(exploratory innovation+exploitative innovation)"to calculate firm ambidexterity.This paper selects the longitudinal study design and uses Tobit regression random effect model to test hypotheses.The results show that:R&D employees'expertise diversity and cooperation stability promote firm ambidexterity;degree centralization of intra-firm co-invention network negatively moderates the relationship between employees'expertise diversity and firm ambidexterity.The main explanation of the positive effect of R&D employees'cooperation stability on firm ambidexterity includes that stable relationship brings knowledge sharing and reduces cooperative conflicts,which helps firm ambidexterity.R&D employees'expertise diversity helps to reorganize knowledge of different application fields,which positively affects firm ambidexterity.However,the high degree centralization of co-invention network will hinder the flow of heterogeneous knowledge within the network,so the degree centralization of co-invention network negatively regulates the relationship between R&D employees'expertise diversity and firm ambidexterity.The theoretical contribution of this paper is that it takes the joint influence of knowledge diversity and R&D organization on firm ambidexterity into consideration.From the perspective of organization and management of R&D employees,we introduce the index of''degree centralization of co-invention network''into the model,which represents the equality of R&D employees.The results confirm the joint influence of subject characteristics and structure characteristics of co-invention network on firm ambidexterity,as such it deepens the theories of firm R&D employees'management and ambidexterity.In the future,researches on firm R&D co-invention network can further deepen the interaction of the three characteristics of network(''actor-relationship-structure'')and firm ambidexterity.At the end,it addresses the suggestions for firm R&D management:First,when high-tech firms recruit R&D employees with different work experiences and educational backgrounds,they also need to establish an equal cooperative relationship and a good platform to promote communication between R&D employees and internal knowledge flows;Second,high-tech firms should consider employees'cooperation stability when setting up project teams,and promote knowledge sharing and cooperative efficiency through stable cooperation.