Due to the limitation of firms' own knowledge and capability, innovation search has become an effective method for firms to obtain necessary resources and pursue innovation development. Existing researches have shown that the innovation search strategies adopted by firms have significant impacts on the innovation outcome. By adopting an open innovation model, firms would gain accesses to resources that are previously hard to get, generate certain impacts on driving forces of internal innovation, and enhance innovation performance. Furthermore, studies regarding firms' cognitive processes have also demonstrated that increasing innovation search breadth is important for alleviating cognitive biases. When facing the uncertainty of innovation activities, firms may seek for broader innovation search. While pursuing multiple innovative objectives, firms could also increase their chances of innovation success with more knowledge sources. By studying the relationship among innovation objective, knowledge source and innovation outcome, this paper examines the impact of innovation search breadth on innovation success and verifies the positive effectiveness of innovation search breadth. Our study mainly addresses the following three research questions: first, would more innovation objectives increase the possibility of innovation success? Second, would more knowledge sources increase the possibility of innovation success? Moreover, would the aforementioned two relationships be affected by single dependency? In order to answer these three questions, this paper builds a theoretical framework through a combination of economic and statistical analyses, and conducts empirical analyses on a large data set of 2008 Chinese CIS (which includes data on 870 firms in 30 manufacturing segment industries) to draw conclusions on the effectiveness of innovation search breadth. Our study finds that the breadth of innovation objectives is positively related to the innovation outcome, i.e., the more innovation objectives a firm has, the more likely its innovation would be successful; the breadth of knowledge sources is also found to be positively related to the innovation outcome, i.e., the more knowledge sources a firm utilizes, the more likely its innovation would be successful; moreover, dependence on single knowledge source has a negative yet not reversing moderating effect on knowledge source's positive impact on innovation success. Robustness checks including using alternative variables and grouping samples by different categories further support the results of our study. This paper shows that positive effectiveness of innovation search breadth does exist among Chinese manufacturing firm: both innovation objective breadth and knowledge source breadth have positive relationship with the outcome of firms' innovation activities; meanwhile, if a firm relies highly on a small number of innovation knowledge resources, such single dependence would reduce the positive effect of knowledge source breadth.
Key words
breadth of innovation search /
innovation objectives /
knowledge sources /
2008 Chinese CIS
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