Abstract:     Innovation is an important factor to guarantee success in enterprise performance. An enterprise′s competitive advantage not only lies in the development of existing technology and resources to improve efficiency, but also lies in the development of new innovation opportunities. For enterprises, exploratory innovation is a relatively large and radical innovation behavior. Exploratory innovation is an important choice, and the evolution process of enterprise exploratory innovation is constantly disturbed by products and processes, and also affected by TMT (Top Management Team) strategic decisions. The social capital of TMT dynamic capabilities drives the theoretical development of how TMT affects the level of exploratory innovation and provides new insights into why some TMT may decide to increase exploratory innovation while others may not, or even decide to reduce exploratory innovation.Social capital is a complex concept, and the relationship between external social capital and exploratory innovation may be more complex than previously described. Many scholars also recognize the possible negative effects of social capital and warn of the need to delve into its “dark side”. Therefore, it is urgent and important to clarify the exact relationship between TMT external social capital and exploratory innovation performance. TMT cognitive process affects social capital. If we do not understand TMT cognitive characteristics, we cannot evaluate the impact of social capital on exploratory innovation. TMT alertness is the cognitive ability to deal with dynamic environmental changes that a company faces through higher perception. However, TMT alertness, which emphasizes mental processes, has largely not received sufficient academic attention. Therefore, this paper attempts to explore the social and cognitive mechanism of exploratory innovation by integrating TMT cognition, social capital and innovation, which are three interrelated theoretical modules, and helps to create a complete picture of TMT external social capital′s understanding of exploratory innovation.The results of this paper showed that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between network centrality, relationship strength and exploratory innovation. This paper confirmed that TMT alertness has a positive impact on exploratory innovation, indicating that TMT with higher alertness can scan, perceive and judge exploratory innovation opportunities. Furthermore, this paper found that TMT alertness moderated the curve relationship between network connection centrality and relationship strength and exploratory innovation, that is, with the increase of TMT alertness, the curve relationship between network centrality and exploratory innovation would be steeper, and the negative slope of the inverted U-shaped relationship would be larger.The contributions of this paper are as follows: First, this paper will help to reveal the “actual psychological and social processes that transform TMT execution characteristics into strategic actions”, deepen the understanding of the strategic process of exploratory innovation, and effectively respond to the call for more research on the antecedents of exploratory innovation. Second, the research results have confirmed the contradiction of external social capital of TMT, which are concerned by previous literature, and will help clarify the fuzzy effect of social capital. The research results are a step forward in a series of integrated studies. Third, the findings of this paper will provide new insights into the understanding of alertness, extend the theory of alertness, and demonstrate the importance of shifting conversation away from the TMT demographic variables widely used in the previous studies to deeper variables.The results of this paper will also put forward some management enlightment for enterprises. First, TMT should strive to obtain the centrality of multi-channel resources in the industry network. TMT should also learn to gain and maintain competitive advantage by utilizing network relationship strength to develop strategies that focus on synergy between external knowledge search and utilization. Second, TMT should avoid the general idea that external network relations are always beneficial, and enterprises should advocate the implementation of TMT external social capital opening strategy should not be oversimplified. Third, enterprises can provide learning guidance for TMT members, and appropriate sponsored training can help TMT develop and improve their alertness ability, bringing better performance results for enterprises.

Key words: network centrality, network relationship strength, TMT alertness, exploratory innovation