Abstract: One of the salient features of the era of knowledge economy is that enterprises usually establish different knowledge-based external network relationships to provide complementary knowledge resources for enterprises to further create value for enterprises and enhance their innovation performance. Based on the network relations theory and resource-based theory, this paper builds the external knowledge acquisition and responsive market orientation into the research frame, and constructs an adjusted mediating effect model, and analyzes the inner relationship between entrepreneur network capabilities and the incremental innovation performance. The results show that there is a significant positive relationship between entrepreneur network capabilities and incremental innovation performance. External knowledge acquisition plays a mediating role between entrepreneur network capabilities and incremental innovation performance. Responsive market orientation is positively moderating the positive relationship between the external knowledge acquisition and the incremental innovation performance.

Key words: network capabilities, external knowledge acquisition, responsive market orientation, incremental innovation performance