Abstract:     The manufacturing industry is the key to promoting high-quality economic development. Under the combined influence of the US technological suppression and the COVID-19, bottlenecks such as key core technology being restricted and reliance on imports of high-end manufacturing equipment have become increasingly prominent. Chinese manufacturing enterprises urgently need to carry out key core technology innovation and improve technology innovation capability. Therefore, exploring the effective path of key core technology innovation for manufacturing enterprises in the Chinese context has become an important issue.Key core technology means the technical system that controls the commanding heights of the industry technology. Existing research has focused on the key core technology of large enterprises, ignoring the important role of small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises. Therefore, it is urgent to deeply explore the breakthrough path and mechanism of key core technology innovation for small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises.In terms of overall development, resource orchestration links, combines and reconfigures innovation resources inside and outside, thus promoting key core technology innovation. In terms of specific mechanism, appropriate resource actions should be taken to ensure the successful achievement of technology innovation goals. Therefore, resource orchestration theory can fully reveal the evolutionary path and micro-mechanism of key core technology innovation in small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises.This study selected Himile as the case sample to explore how small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprise with a shortage of initial innovation resources can achieve key core technology innovation through resource orchestration. The research found that: firstly, depending on the driving factors and resource conditions, small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprise adopts the resource orchestration approaches of agglomerative resource structuring, reconfigurative resource bundling and open resource leveraging. Secondly, small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises adopt positive-adaptive logic to carry out key core technology innovation, and tend to the technology innovation path of combination of breakthrough innovation and micro-innovation.The theoretical contributions of this study are as follows: first, we constructed a theoretical model of key core technology innovation in small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises from a dynamic perspective, and deepened the theoretical research on technology innovation. Second, we proposed a technology innovation path that combines breakthrough innovation and micro-innovation, and analyzed the realization mechanism of micro-innovation to enrich the theoretical research. Third, we applied the resource orchestration theory to the research of key core technology innovation, and expanded the research on the relationship between resource orchestration and key core technology innovation.

Key words:  small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprise, key core technology innovation, resource orchestration