توسعه‌ی محصول جدید: یک دیدگاه توزیع نوآوری

This study examines the antecedents of the adoption of innovation diffusion in high technology firms in China and its effect on new product creativity and financial performance through a series of statistical techniques including logistic analysis, multivariate analysis of variance, and multiple regression analysis. The findings indicate that the adoption of innovation diffusion in high technology firms is significantly related to the competition intent of these firms including aggressive technology posture and product development frequency. The adoption of innovation diffusion also has been showed to positively contribute to the new product creativity and financial performance. The theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

In past decades, knowledge creation has attracted increasing attention from knowledge and strategic management researchers. In a competitive setting, knowledge creation brings firms some advantages including enabling them to create unique, inimitable, and valuable intangible resources (Grant, 1997), create successful new products (Madhavan & Grover, 1998), renew organization (Dougherty, 1992), and in some firms obtain strategic advantage over their competitors (Nonaka, 1994). In line with the paramount interest in knowledge creation, scholars are paying attention to new product development in high technology firms. Product innovation has been recognized as in essence for their renewal (Dougherty, 1992). These firms heavily rely on new product introduction and commercialization to survive in intensive competitive environment characterized by rapid product obsolesce and evolving customer needs. High technology firms pursue growth mainly through new product development, which in turn results in unprecedented levels of new product introductions (Varadarajan & Jayachandran, 1999). However, these firms still face problems in achieving their growth. First, evolving market needs make products obsolete quickly, firms face more intensive competition than ever before. Second, competition via new product launches intends to enhance firms' performance in their own product endeavors, but it has the unintended effect of exposing consumers to newness on a widespread scale (Redmond, 2002). As a result of this exposure, consumers are habituated to a continuous flow of new products and services and accept them more readily than in the past. Product development has become a dynamic capability of the firms, because of its ability to alter the resource configuration of the firms (Eisenhardt & Martin, 2000). Liability of newness has been used to describe the problems these firms face (Stinchcombe, 1965). Several studies have suggested that knowledge creation is a potential strategy for these innovation-driven high technology firms because it enables them to maintain dynamic innovation capability and come up with the evolving market expectations aiming at achieving competitive advantage (Krogh, Nonaka, & Aben, 2001). Empirical studies on high technology firms have found that knowledge creation plays an important role in their new products development (Madhavan and Grover, 1998). Strategic innovation diffusion converts newly created knowledge into increase firm value (for example, through new product offerings). Within the knowledge creation literature, strategic researchers have focused on the different level when analyzing innovation diffusion processes (e.g., Drazin & Sschoonhoven, 1996). Intrafirm innovation diffusion has received limited research attention, and is the focus of the study. Bandwagons effects (Abrahamson & Rosenkopf, 1993) contribute to explanation of firms' innovation diffusion. Bandwagons create self-reinforcing loops because the bigger the bandwagon gets, the larger the number of parties involved in the bandwagon. In their study, expected returns result from a given innovation trigger bandwagon effects which leads to wider innovation diffusion. The greater the uncertainty surrounding an innovation is, the greater the diffusion becomes in a firm. Drawing on the bandwagon effect (Abrahamson and Rosenkopf, 1993), I define innovation diffusion as a tacit knowledge transfer process turning innovation into new products in an effort to foster and advance the innovation. After the new products are introduced to the market, they will affect the market, and the evolving market needs require another round of innovation which results in evolving innovations. Prior studies have fostered the understanding of innovation diffusion. However, several research gaps remain. First, prior research on knowledge creation and transfer among high technology firms has focused mainly on the sharing of existing knowledge (Lubit, 2001). Knowledge creation and transfer that involve innovation diffusion have received limited attention. Second, a majority of prior studies have focused their attention on non-high technology industry with only a few showed their interests in high technology firms. Bruton and Rubanik (1997) regarded the development of high technology industry as a revitalization tool for developed market economies and as a driver of economic transformation in transitional economies. Yet, little research has assessed the driving forces which lead to a firm's innovation diffusion. Third, little prior research has linked innovation diffusion with new product performance. Knowledge creation and transfer are thought to influence new product performance because they provide opportunities for learning, acquiring, sharing, and innovating (Krogh et al., 2001 and Madhavan and Grover, 1998). Given the requirement of intellectual capital and the potential attractiveness of innovation diffusion to these firms, it is important to examine the relationship between innovation diffusion and new product performance. This study contributes to the literature by examining the above gaps. The purpose of this study is to empirically examine: how the adoption of innovation diffusion matters in improving new product creativity and performance; and the antecedents of the innovation diffusion including environmental dynamics (competitive intensity and technological turbulence) and competition intent (aggressive technological posture and product development frequency) which drive the focus of innovation diffusion by a sample of IT firms in China.

This empirical study examined how the adoption of innovation diffusion matters in improving new product creativity and performance. The antecedents of the adoption of innovation diffusion are environmental dynamics (competitive intensity and technological turbulence) and competition intent of a firm (aggressive technological posture and product development frequency). In the results of analyses, competitive intensity and technological turbulence have been shown to have no significant effects on the adoption of innovation diffusion. Firms are capable of being successful in new product development by enhancing their ability to adapt to constantly changing environmental conditions, in line with the dominant business logic utilized (Tuominen, Rajala, Moller, & Anttila, 2003). No matter how volatile the environment is, these high technology firms with competition intent tend to adopt innovation diffusion activities to enable themselves to keep pace with the environment dynamics. The results suggest that aggressive tech posture and product development frequency pose significant impacts on the adoption of innovation diffusion. It indicates the competition intent of a firm has been a determinant of a high technology firm's adoption of innovation diffusion. The results support the hypotheses on the positive relationships between the adoption innovation diffusion and new product creativity and performance. The unexpected finding of this study is that new product creativity has had a negative effect on new product financial performance of high technology firms in China. This surprising finding is contrary to the theoretical arguments (Tatikonda & Montoya-Weiss, 2001) and empirical findings by Li and Atuahene-Gima (1999). One plausible explanation might be that although new product creativity carries a positive connotation in new product development (e.g., Blumentritt, 2004). A firm achieves high new product creativity through continuous organizational learning. In the process of learning, the increased knowledge associated with a learning process may reduce the variability of performance rather than increase it (March, 1991). Hence, learning makes performance more reliable but the risk associated with reduced variability is that the organization may become resistant to contradictory information. In line with it, in the process of continuous learning, organizational learning research has found that learning does not always lead to positive outcomes (Miner & Meziam, 1996). The other possible explanation might be a firm's high ability to leverage its customer base. New product creativity enables a firm to retain its customers and improve the quality of its products. For a knowledge oriented high technology firm, when it uses knowledge management system to improve product quality, higher ability to leverage the customer base may actually hurt profits (Ofek & Sarvary, 2001). The results of this study offer two main implications for researchers and practitioners of high technology firms. First, the findings suggest a weak relationship between environmental dynamics and the adoption of innovation diffusion, which indicates that the adoption of innovation diffusion activities in high technology firms in China is not drawn significantly by competitive intensity and technological turbulence acting as a force of the adoption of innovation diffusion. It shows that the adoption of innovation diffusion activities is driven hardly by competition intent of high technology firms in China. To perform outstandingly, these firms have a great propensity to adopt innovation diffusion aiming to improve their social status (Rogers, 1995) regardless of environmental dynamics. Yet, the competition intent of the firms helps strengthen the driving force of innovation diffusion. Aggressive technological posture and product development frequency foster innovation, thus, build these firms resource advantage (Hunt & Morgan, 1995). Second, from managerial standpoint, these findings suggest the need for managers of high technology firms in China to foster competition intent and build up a sense of competition throughout the organizations in this highly competitive industry. As Penrose (1995: 35) argued, when a firm intends to branch out into new lines of activity, ‘… mere specialization of managerial knowledge and ability is not of itself a serious bar if existing executives are sufficiently interested and imaginative to bring into the firm people possessing the relevant knowledge and ability.’ New product financial performance and creativity are positively related to the adoption of innovation diffusion, which suggests managers the importance of leveraging internal pushing forces acted by competition intent of the firms with environmental dynamics. The impetus of the adoption of innovation diffusion is crucial for these firms to achieve high new product performance and creativity. The limitations of this study constraint the interpretation of the results. First, regional sampling does limit the generality of the results. Although Shanghai is the biggest city in China, the high technology firms of this region might not represent this industry in China. It may be instructive for future research to extend to other regions or other transitional economies. Second, this study does not control for the firm's ownership and origin. The ownership (e.g., independent and corporate) and origin (joint venture and privately owned) could affect a firm's adoption of innovation diffusion. Thus, future research should control for these variables. Third, the theoretical model focuses on only a limited number of driving factors of the adoption of innovation diffusion. Other potential impacts on innovation diffusion could be posed by a firm's innovation capability (Collis, 1994) and the implementation of its knowledge management strategy (Earl, 2001). Fourth and finally, in this study, the sample was taken from high technology industry because the paramount importance of innovation diffusion is to new product success in this highly competitive area. However, the generality of this study results is limited by the high technology setting since high technology firms face more dynamic environment and have stronger competition intent and greater propensity to adopt innovation diffusion. Future research may wish to address this issue in other industries.