Abstract:     In the era of knowledge-based economy, innovation is the core capability of enterprise development, and knowledge acquisition is the foundation of innovation. For an organization, acquiring knowledge across organizations becomes a key issue to improve its innovation ability. For inter-organizational groups, understanding how knowledge flows is also essential for innovation management and policy making. Existing research on the influence factors of inter-organizational knowledge flow can be divided into two types; one is mainly focused on the contextual factors, such as geographical distance, intellectual property, organizational environment and network location, etc., the other one is the interaction factors, including strength, social capital, trust and so on.In fact, with the development of IT, technical competition and collaboration in the new energy vehicles industry have become widespread, and inter-organizational knowledge activities are also more frequent. This implies that the effect of contextual factors on knowledge flow gradually declines, innovation-oriented interaction becomes the power source of knowledge flow among organizations. However, scholars mainly pay attention to collaboration, while ignoring other types of relationships, such as competition. Yet now, competition is the basic inter-organizational relationship, as the opposite of collaboration, competition usually  is accompanied by it. Therefore, we wonder whether inter-organizational competition and cooperative relationships between organizations could promote knowledge flow, so as to realize the diffusion and integration of new knowledge in the industry. Do the characters of knowledge activities between organizations that have co-opetition relationships consistent with those that have a single relationship? In addition, what′s the role of the innovation scale gap in their knowledge flow? After reviewing the research status at home and abroad and combining with the key problems that needed to be solved, based on the co-opetition theory, this paper studies the mechanism of the technical co-opetition and the moderating effect of inter-organizational innovation scale gap, and proposes the following hypothesis: H1a: The intensity of inter-organizational technical collaboration has a positive effect on knowledge flow; H1b: The innovation scale gap between organizations weakens the positive effect of technical collaboration on knowledge flow; H2a: The intensity of inter-organizational technological competition has a positive effect on knowledge flow; H2b: The innovation scale gap between organizations strengthens the positive effect of technical competition on knowledge flow; H3a: The intensity of inter-organizational technical co-opetition has a negative effect on the knowledge flow; and H3b: Inter-organizational innovation scale gap strengthens the negative effect of technical co-opetition on knowledge flow. In empirical applications, by taking 511 organizations in the "New Energy Vehicles Industry" as samples and using the patent data from 2008 to 2017 from USPTO to measure technology co-opetition and knowledge flow, we introduced the QAP method to build a multiple regression analysis model with organizational pairs as the unit for testing the hypothesis. Considering the relationship has a time lag effect, cross-time matching is carried out in this part. For example, when the time range of the independent variable is from 2008 to 2010, the measurement of the dependent variable is from 2011 to 2013. Finally, with empirical analysis, the following conclusions and implications are drawn: Both technical collaboration and competition between organizations contribute to the knowledge flow, and the positive effect of technical collaboration is more significant. Technical co-opetition is negative to the knowledge flow. In parallel, the role of the innovation scale gap is different. Specifically, it weakens the direct effect of technical collaboration on knowledge flow, and enhances the direct effects of technical competition and technical co-opetition on knowledge flow. According to results, technical collaboration has become an essential means for organizations to access external resources and improve technical ability. However, collaborating with rivals along with higher risk, the uncertainty of knowledge flow will take the intense competition, so if organizations exist competive relationships, they will seriously restrict inter-organizational knowledge activities because of concerns about their own interests. Our study makes some contributions to practice to a certain degree. From the point of large enterprises, they naturally compete with large enterprises in the industry, so they are better to cooperate with enterprises those have high complementary technical resources, which is more conducive to giving full play to the knowledge and resource advantages of both sides and creating more competitive new technologies. Ordinarily, small enterprises, have supporting collaboration relationships with large enterprises. For them, it is imperative to cooperate with enterprises with similar innovation basis in the light of product homogeneity. In addition, policymakers can set up innovation collaboration platforms for different technical goals based on the current development status of the industry, and further introduce competition mechanisms to improve the efficiency of the overall knowledge flow in the whole.

Key words: technical collaboration, technical competition, technical co-opetition, innovation scale gap, knowledge flow