Abstract:  Process innovation is the key means in market competition. The influencing factors of process innovation are somewhat dispersed in the extant literature, mainly including human resource, finance, technical strength, competition and so on. But process innovation has an important characteristic, namely production orientation, and there are few articles which have discussed the relationship between production activity and process innovation decision. From the perspective of attention-based view, this paper uses multinomial logistic regression and the enterprise survey data which were published by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to analyze the impact of production target on managers’ choice of process development method - independent innovation, cooperative innovation or imitation. The results show that the more difficult it is to achieve production target, the more prone it is to choose cooperative innovation and imitation, and potentially financial dilemma has a moderating effect. In addition, when there are many driving factors for implementing process innovation, the more difficult it is to achieve production target, the more inclined it is to choose innovation rather than imitation method.

Key words: production target, process innovation, attention-based view, process development purpose