知识重组能力与高新技术企业绩效———冗余资源 与创新开放度的调节效应分析

In the era of knowledge economy, the high-tech firms featured with intensive knowledge and technology investment are the important entities of independent innovation. The intellectual property rights have become vital factors for the high-tech firm′ sdevelopment. Patents are usually regarded as the core part in the system of the intellectual property rights. The invention of patents isdiscussed by many researches in the field of innovation management, especially on the aspects of patents nature and how patents couldbe effectively produced from the knowledge recombination perspective. Existing literature pointed out that new patents can beconsidered as a recombination of extant knowledge involved in previous patents. Therefore, an in-depth analysis of the relationshipbetween knowledge recombination capability and the high-tech firm′s performance from the perspective of recombination innovation isneeded to be conducted, and is of great theoretical and practical significance for high-tech firms to strengthen their roles as the mainforce of independent innovation. According to different ways of knowledge recombination, some studies have divided the knowledgerecombination into recombination reuse and recombination creation. Recombination reuse is the development of existing knowledgecombination in new scenes to solve new problems, and recombinant creation is the development of the combination relationship betweenexisting discrete knowledge elements in order to figure out innovative technology. Recombination reuse and recombination creation areboth related to existing knowledge elements, and the key difference between them is whether new combination relationship is knowledge creation. High knowledge recombination reuse capability promotes the establishment of cooperation routines among internalR&D researchers and helps to stimulate the formation of new knowledge recombination ideas. Meanwhile, high knowledgerecombination creation capability promotes the formation of unique internal knowledge base features and encourages R&D researchers toconduct more internal knowledge searches to reduce costs and risks in the innovation process. Therefore, both of the knowledgerecombination capabilities promote the high-tech firm′ s performance. The outputs of internal cooperation involved in knowledgerecombination are closely related to the potentials of internal knowledge recombination and the internal coordination cost. The high-techfirm′s slack resources can effectively relieve the additional costs of innovation activities and the pressure from internal and externalenvironmental changes, and help to create an organizational culture advocating experiments. Therefore, it enhances the positive effectsof the knowledge recombination capabilities on the high-tech firm′s performance. On the other hand, there are some similaritiesbetween the internal and external cooperation routines. In the process of open innovation, a high-tech firm′s cooperation routines withexternal actors may be influenced by its existing internal cooperation routines. Different knowledge recombination capabilities reflectdifferent internal cooperation routines. Innovation openness has differential effects between the knowledge recombination capabilitiesand the high-tech firm′s performance. In order to test the proposed hypotheses, a regression analysis is conducted by using generalizedestimating equations based on panel data of 982 listed high-tech firms in China′s manufacturing industry from 2000 to 2017. The initialfirm list comes from China Securities Regulatory Commission. The data is manually collected from National Enterprise CreditInformation Disclosure System, CSMAR database, firm official website, firm annual report and Intellectual Property Office of HunanProvince.The empirical results show that both knowledge recombinant reuse capability and knowledge recombinant creation capabilitypromote the high-tech firm′s performance. Slack resources enhance the positive relationship between the recombinant capabilities andthe high-tech firm′s performance. Innovation openness weakens the positive relationship between the recombinant reuse capability andthe high-tech firm′s performance, but its moderating effect in the relationship between the recombinant creation capability and the hightechfirm′s performance is not significant. In order to verify the robustness of the empirical results, this study uses random effect modeland pooled regression model for robust analysis. The results of the robustness tests are consistent with the above findings, indicatingthat the statistical results are relatively robust.The conclusions of this study expand the research on knowledge combination and the high-tech firm′s performance from therecombination innovation perspective. As the nature of inventions can be regarded as knowledge recombination, it is empirically foundthat the cultivation of different knowledge recombination capabilities plays an important role in promoting economic benefits. On theother hand, this study integrates knowledge recombination capability, slack resources and innovation openness into the same analyticalframework. As the development of interdependency relationship between knowledge elements requires the consumption of certainresources, how to make more effective knowledge recombination decisions based on the internal resource deployment and innovationstrategies is of great significance to improve the high-tech firm′s performance. Our findings offer new insight into the knowledgerecombination literature regarding when and to what extent firms can obtain higher performance.