关键词: 即兴, 拼凑, 中小企业创新, 资源结构

Abstract:  Improvisation and bricolage mean adapting to changing circumstances and looking for new approaches correspondingly. In the hypercompetitive environment nowadays, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) fit and prefer these two tactics for responding to ever-changing situation and their characters of poor planning and high flexibility. More importantly, resource scarcity is prevalent in SMEs, but a large amount of literature ignore these scarcity and study SMEs’ innovation in ideal adequate resource circumstances. Normally, innovation activities, such as research and development, need and consume lots of resources, and SMEs bring forward a large percentage of innovation output although they frequently drop into resource scarcity. It is valuable and interesting to probe into how they overcome the constraint and achieve success in the process of innovation. 
Improvisation and bricolage often occur when enterprises lack in time or material resources, and therefore, become common behavior tactics in SMEs. Meanwhile, roles of improvisation and bricolage have been roundly questioned and criticized for their denying and discarding plans’ effects which are commonplace in nowadays enterprise and seem to constitute the foundation of activities in terms of efficiency and effectiveness in most place. These debatable and conflicting arguments cause confusion in SMEs’ practice, and it’s necessary to carefully analysis and test the effects of improvisation and bricolage. Especially, SMEs have increasingly become an important force in global innovation, and are largely concerned with effects of improvisation and bricolage in breaking time and resource restraints and seizing the opportunity to innovation, because of their shortage in resource and the characters of innovation activities, such as high-risk, high-investment and extended-cycle.
As two common behavior tactics in SMEs, improvisation and bricolage are usually coupled together, and it is important to clarify whether they can promote or interfere the other effect. This paper separately analyzes main effects of improvisation and bricolage and interactive effects between them from the point of SMEs’ innovation outputs. Moreover, resource is necessary for all tactics enforcement, and SMEs are often limited in resource and resource-acquire ability while can adjust resource structure accordingly. In order to fully realize the value of improvisation and bricolage in SMEs’ innovation process, this paper, therefore, probes into suitable resource structure for these two tactics from the points of quantity relation between absorbed resource and unabsorbed resource. 
Comparing with those SMEs what pay less attention to or even lack in innovation as the sample, technology-based SMEs benefit for rigorously testification in our research context. The former kind of SMEs are poor in system variation from the perspective of innovation, and cannot show clearly how other factors bring out variation of innovation output, while the latter can be just the opposite. In view of industrial difference and distribution character of technology-based SMEs, this paper selects software firms in Hefei and Nanjing cities as the sample. By performing the multiple linear regression test using questionnaire data from 232 SMEs in software industry with ordinary least squares (OLS) method and the software of SPSS, it confirms that: Firstly, the effects of improvisation and bricolage on SMEs’ innovation outputs are inversed-U shape and linear positive, respectively. Namely, applying improvisation tactics appropriately seems most conducive to promoting innovation while more bricolage will induce more innovation output to SMEs. Secondly, coefficient of product item of improvisation and bricolage is negative significantly. It demonstrates that these two tactics can weaken the other one’s effect on SMEs’ innovation outputs, and it should be prudent to perform these two tactics simultaneously. Thirdly, coefficients of product items of resource structure or its square multiplied by improvisation are positive significantly while the product item referring resource structure and bricolage is positive, but not significant. All of these results together to demonstrate that, it’s benefit to maintain more absorbed resource, but not the unabsorbed one, for enhancing improvisation’s effect on SMEs’ innovation output. It other words, considering the limitation of total available resources, SMEs should allocate more resource to specific activities and actors to enhance the effect of improvisation on innovation output.
From the perspective of SMEs’ innovation, these results represent the functions and the roles of improvisation and bricolage separately, what can be further used to clarify the opposite views about their roles. As some scholars promoted, improvisation and bricolage may create chaos and failure to actors. However, our research hypothesis and empirical study results offer rebuttal of these claims, and also point out the necessary of discussing their effects on innovation in the tactics combination level. Moreover, it indicates that absorbing resource and adjusting resource structure can contribute to create favorable environment for these tactics. Furthermore, although improvisation often takes place in the resource scarcity condition, it also needs appropriate resource support, such as absorbed-oriented resource structure. More specifically, results of this study can provide several enlightenment and serve as reference for SMEs dealing with resource scarcity and making efforts on innovation in the future. First, SMEs can enhance innovation output by bricolage tactics, and should regularize, restrain and guide improvisation tactics on its domain and extent. It doesn’t always stand up for the viewpoints that persistently assert bricolage’s benefit for innovation although SMEs prefer this tactics for its flexibility and other advantages. Secondly, both of improvisation and bricolage are suitable in resource scarcity environment, but it doesn’t means that enterprises should take them simultaneously. Fulfill of improvisation or bricolage tactics need relevant necessary resource, and SMEs’ limited resource can’t effectively afford them simultaneously. Thus, one these two tactics will weaken the other’s effect on innovation output instead of strengthening it. In other words, SMEs should carefully take improvisation and bricolage at the same time because for negative interactive effects between them, and it is worth discussing about the symbiotic and compatible relationships between these two common tactics. Thirdly, effects of improvisation are diversified and contextualized, and should be carried out by combination with appropriate resource allocation. Success in fulfilling improvisation needs flexible behaviors and cooperation of employees, and it’s beneficial for realizing innovation value of improvisation definitely to allocate resource to grass-root employees, departments, specific areas and affairs. Unabsorbed resource, such as cash, can be widely used for most contexts, but realization of their value need transform themselves into capacities, labors and other absorbed resource. Transformation therein takes lots of time while greatest value of improvisation lies in the time and speed advantage it can create for enterprise. Thus, comparing with range of application, speed of resource application shows more important and valuable functions for fulfillment of improvisation.

Key words:  improvisation, bricolage, SMEs&rsquo, innovation, resource structure