Abstract:

     Since the implementation of science and technology innovation board, it is increasingly important for science and technology innovation to play a decisive role in China′s economic development, strategic implementation and competitive advantage. As a latecomer of technological innovation, China has gradually narrowed its technological gap with developed countries by introducing technology for incremental innovation, and achieved rapid economic development. However, this incremental innovation mode cannot achieve transcendence and breakthrough. The lack of leading power of science and technology makes Chinese enterprises often encounter the containment of foreign enterprises in chip supply, core patents and other aspects. As a carrier of innovation, only by focusing on the radical innovation based on new products and new technologies, mastering leading technologies and manufacturing advanced products, can scientific and technological enterprises be invincible in the fierce competition and effectively serve the national strategy. Radical innovation can greatly improve product performance, reshape the market position of enterprises, and fundamentally change their technological trajectory and organizational ability. It is an important basis for enterprises to obtain and maintain sustainable competitive advantage. Recent studies have clearly pointed out that mission driven can become the source power of new innovation paradigm. Under the background of the implementation of innovation driven strategy in China and the repeated "neck jamming" of foreign incumbent enterprises, radical product innovation has become a mission-driven innovation based on major national strategies and public interests, which can contribute to coping with major social challenges. Therefore, this study aims to explore how to achieve radical product innovation in the mission-driven context.

      Based on the contingency view, this paper takes the scientific and technological innovation enterprises as a case, and from the perspective of dynamic matching of leadership and sense-making, selects the typical HB biomedical enterprises for case analysis. We found, first, in the context of mission-driven, the three mission forms of mission introduction, identification and internalization drive the three stages of radical product innovation (germination, formation and strengthening); second, according to the different stages of radical product innovation, enterprises should fully consider the matching of leadership and sense-making, and promote the realization of radical product innovation through the effective adaptation of authorization, command, ambidextrous leadership and different sense-making subjects; third, there are three dynamic matching modes of leadership and sense-making, which are complementary matching, complementary matching and integrated matching, and they evolve in turn in the process of radical product innovation.

     The theoretical contributions of this paper are mainly reflected in two aspects: firstly, this paper details the current mission-driven innovation research, conceptualizes the mission-driven innovation based on major social challenges at the macro level into a three-stage mission driven process in the innovation activities at the organizational level, which provides specific ideas for the future research on the materialization of organizational mission. Meanwhile, from the perspective of internal evolution of innovation, this paper reveals the formation mechanism of radical product innovation in the mission-driven context, and expands the innovation management context, which lays the foundation for further answering the question of "how to achieve radical product innovation in the mission-driven context". 

     Secondly, from the perspective of dynamic matching, this paper makes up for the lack of previous studies on the analysis of organizational mission from the perspective of sense-making or leadership, reveals the internal mechanism of mission-driven innovation theory, promotes the development of mission-driven innovation theory from the macro framework based on major social challenges to the specific management practice at the organizational level, and answers the question of how to match sense-making with the leadership can better achieve radical product innovation in mission-driven context. It also contributes to the in-depth conditional research of sense-making and leadership in future innovation activities, that is, we should comprehensively consider the conditional choice in the substantiation research, and choose the corresponding way of sense-making and leadership in different stages of innovation.

Key words: mission-driven, leadership behavior, sense-making, dynamic matching, radical product innovation