Abstract:    Employees now serve as the main source of organizational innovation in the context of the digital age, and organizations cannot ignore the problem of how to unleash employees′ self-driven forces of innovation. However, the science and technology enterprises which playing a significant role in today′s innovation-driven development strategy, as small- and medium-sized businesses in the growth stage with limited resources, face greater demand for innovation resources. Against this background, people are currently the most valuable resource for enterprise innovation, and science and technology enterprises are crucial and more urgent for igniting the employees′ self-driving force of innovation in the organization to maximize the innovation efficiency of organizational human resources and overcome resource limitations to achieve dual and sustainable innovation. However, theoretical research, in contrast to the aforementioned practical importance, appears to be lagging behind. The current study on the self-driving force of innovation is still in the conceptualization and theoretical framework development stages. Existing studies suggest that different innovation behaviors are driven by different driving forces. However, it is unknown what are the differences in the employee drive in different innovation processes and how organizations stimulate employees′ self-driving force across layers. Given the significance of practice and theoretical gaps, how to increase employees′ self-driving forces of innovation in science and technology organizations is a pressing issue that has to be resolved in order to achieve sustainable innovation. This paper aims to answer the following two questions: First, how does the employee′s self-driving force of innovation form? Second, how can the employees′ inherent drive for innovation be realized through activation and iterative improvement? In order to answer the above-mentioned questions, this paper took Infodator Company as the research object, adopted the single-case study based on the theoretical framework of "goal setting-release signal-interpretation signal-activation", and in the end, constructed a mechanism model of the generation and iterative process of employees′ self-driving force of innovation in science and technology enterprises from a dynamic perspective. The study discovered that: First, organizational goals and cognition serve as the foundation for generating employees′ self-driving force of innovation. In the process of transforming enterprise goals from technology research and development to innovation symbiosis-led, the utilization of human resources has undergone the cognitive transformation of resources "exchange-development-generation-ecology" and achieved the "goal setting" at this point. Second, in the process of organizational cross-layer influence, the sense-giving mechanism that matches organizational cognition is the key to transmitting organizational cognition to employees and then activating their self-driving force of innovation, that is, the organization transmits organizational cognition to employees through four sense-giving mechanism: "one-way pressurization", "one-way boosting", "multi-directional linking" and "spatial field force". The "release signal" was achieved at this point. Third, under various sense-giving mechanisms, employees can "interpret signals" of organization through the attention allocation process of "sensing-attention-selection", and then realize "activation" of employees. That is to say, employees′ self-driving force of innovation emerges in different stages, and presents an iterative logic from germination, transformation to upgrade. Specifically, employees have realized the "germination" iteration from the no self-driving force of innovation to the self-driving force for idea implementation, to the "transformation" iteration of the self-driving force for idea generation, and the "upgrade" iteration of the self-driving force for idea dissemination. The role of employees in innovation is truly transformed from passive executors to active creators. At this time, the organization successfully realizes the activation of employees, making it one of the power sources of organizational innovation. The theoretical contributions of this paper are as follows: First, this paper constructed a cross-level generation mechanism chain of employees′ self-driving force of innovation by deconstructing the process of organizational cross-level influencing employees′ self-driving force of innovation, responding to the call for exploring the motivational potential factors in the work environment. Second, based on the perspective of autonomy and innovation behavior, this paper identified four types of employees′ self-driving force of innovation, examined the iterative process, and expanded and dynamized the research on employees′ self-driving force of innovation.

Key words:  science and technology enterprise, self-driving force of innovation, human resource utilization cognition, sense-giving