供应链流程创新如何影响农业企业发展?整合的调节作用

How Does Supply Chain Innovation Affect the Development of Agricultural Enterprises? The Moderating Effects of Integration

在当今社会环境下,创新能力已经成为决定企业生存和发展的根本动力,创新主体也从单一的组织扩展到供应链成员。相关学者普遍认为供应链创新能够正向影响企业绩效,但是农业供应链与传统供应链有不同之处,而已有研究对其背后的作用机制却少有深入探讨。为此,本研究从供应链流程角度重新划分供应链创新类型,检验各种创新类型与农业企业发展之间的关系,并探索不同的整合方式在其中发挥的调节作用。研究结果表明,农业企业的生产和分销流程创新对其发展有显著的促进作用;同时纵向整合在农业企业的生产流程创新对企业发展的正向作用中起消极的调节作用,供应链整合在生产流程和分销流程创新的正向作用中起到积极的调节作用。事后分析还表明,在流程创新对农业企业发展的影响中,网络关系强度发挥了中介作用。本研究结合农业供应链创新的现状,对农业企业优化创新结构、实现协同效应提出了建议。

In today’s social environment, innovation capability has become the fundamental driving force for the survival and development of enterprises, and the main body of innovation has expanded from a single organization to the supply chain members.Relevant scholars generally believe that supply chain innovation can positively affect enterprise performance, but agricultural supply chain and traditional supply chain are different, and the underlying mechanisms of their effects are rarely discussed in depth in previous studies. Therefore, this paper takes into account the characteristics of agricultural supply chain, and re-divides the types of agricultural supply chain innovation from the perspective of process management, to test the relationship between each type and the development of agricultural enterprises, and explore contingent effects of different forms of integration.In this paper, 1012 panel data of 92 listed agricultural enterprises in China spanning 11 years from 2007 to 2017 are selected as research samples, and a random effect model is constructed for hypothesis, endogeneity and robustness tests. The results show that innovation in production process and distribution process has positive effects on the development of agricultural enterprises. Further,vertical integration negatively moderates the positive effect of agricultural enterprises’ production process innovation on their development, but supply chain integration positively moderates not only the positive effect of production process innovation and distribution process innovation on the development of agricultural enterprises. The results of post hoc analysis show that network relationship strength mediates the effects of process innovation on the development of agricultural enterprises.The results show that the investment outcomes of agricultural enterprises in innovation in different supply chain processes are different. Innovation related to production processes determines the quality and features of products and it is the most important. Innovation related to distribution processes determines consumer satisfaction such as brand, package, and distribution. The two kinds of process innovation prompt the development of agricultural enterprises through the formation of collaborative network which brings in internal and external resource optimization and information sharing. This is consistent with the hypothesis in this paper. However,innovation related to supply has no significant effect on enterprise development indicators lagged one term and has a significant effect on profits lagged multiple terms. The underlying reasons may be that supply chain process innovation, which is mainly about the research and development of product materials, requires a lot of fundamental research. Since research needs great investments at the early stage and sustains for a long term, the performance in the short term is not significant.Further, we consider that there exists a context of supply chain innovation. The higher level of vertical integration of agricultural enterprises represents more weakened promotion effect of production process innovation on enterprise development. When the higher level of supply chain integration of agricultural enterprises is reflected as improved supply chain efficiency and higher level of information traceability, production process innovation and distribution process innovation have stronger positive effect on enterprise development. That is, when agricultural enterprises invest in production and distribution process innovation, the internal resource integration cannot meet the resource demands of supply chain innovation. Therefore, only through expanding the scope of resource integration and searching external supply chain resource integration can innovation investment be matched to realize innovation value.In addition, for supply chain process innovation, on one hand, its short-term performance is not significant;and on the other hand, its moderating effect on the long-term performance is also not significant, which indicates that this innovation strategy was not affected by the way of integration from a long-term perspective.