آیا هم افزایی همیشه خوب است؟تبیین اثر سرمایه نوآوری و سرمایه مشتری بر عملکرد شرکت در دو زمینه

The resource-based view (RBV) posits that a firm can leverage the effect of existing capital on firm performance via capital configuration, complementarity, and integration, but little empirical research has addressed these issues. This study investigates the effects of innovation capital and customer capital on firm performance, whether their complementary interactions are important determinants of relative firm performance within the industry, and whether these effects considerably differ significantly between high- and low-technology manufacturing firms. Based on data collected from 312 high-technology manufacturing firms and 204 low-technology manufacturing firms in the Taiwanese manufacturing industry, the results of SEM analyses demonstrate that the main effects of both innovation and customer capital significantly and positively impact firm performance. The analytical results demonstrate that: (1) a significant interaction effect only exists in the high-technology manufacturing firms; (2) the main effect of customer capital is lower among high-technology manufacturing firms; (3) the main effect of innovation capital is the same for both high- and low-technology manufacturing firms. Additionally, this investigation also discusses the limitations of the current research, future research directions, and the theoretical and practical implications of the empirical analysis.

How a business achieves and maintains a superior competitive position is a key issue in management research (Day, 1994). Consider Apple Computers, the PC industry leader in design and technology, which designed the iPod and iMac, both of which Forturn ranks among the 25 best products in the world (Bonamici et al., 2004; Lewis, 2004). Apple products are successful because the company emphasizes both product innovation and customer value (Daghfous and White, 1994; March, 1994). Especially, Apple banks heavily on its innovativeness and quality customer service, which have brought Apple numerous business opportunities. Additionally, Coca-Cola, a low-technology manufacturing firm, also continuously emphasizes the importance of customers and is heavily reliant upon customer capital to establish a leading market position. As a result, Coca-Cola enjoys better global brand recognition and produces “The Best Known Product in the World” (Allen, 1994). It is seen from the examples of these two successful companies that innovation and customer value are key factors in achieving excellent firm performance and thus market success. A review of the literature reveals that research on innovation and customer value appears in the literature not only of marketing (e.g., Dutta et al., 1999; Luo et al., 2004; Rosen et al., 1998) but also of economics (e.g., Chauvin and Hirschey, 1993; Vivero, 2002; Zeng, 2001) and strategic management (e.g., Day, 1994; Kessler and Chakrabarti, 1996; Song et al., 2005). The extant literature suggests that superior firm performance can derive from uniqueness of resources (e.g., Barney, 1991; Kor and Mahoney, 2000), reconfiguration and integration of existing resources (e.g., Barney, 2002; Ray et al., 2004), and/or from the ability to respond appropriately to the surrounding industrial environment (e.g., Miller and Shamsie, 1996; Mintzberg, 1987). Furthermore, the resource-based view (RBV) suggests that a firm must develop internal and external resources to establish a competitive advantage and build a competive niche (Barney, 1995). The relationships between resources (or capital) and firm performance have attracted considerable research interest, but relatively little is known regarding who some firms successfully use their resources (or capital) while others do not (Tena et al., 2001; Tseng and Goo, 2005). This study contributes to the literature by focusing on two neglected issues: (1) the impact of the interaction and main effects between innovation capital and customer capital on firm performance and (2) the differential impacts of innovation capital and customer capital and their interaction in high- vs. low-technology manufacturing industries. The former addresses whether complementary capitals have synergistic effects, while the latter specifies industry characteristics that can be expected to produce both main and synergistic effects. Specifically, this study examines the relationships of innovation capital and customer capital with firm performance, and their interaction in two industries, namely the high- and low-technology manufacturing industries. The high-technology manufacturing industry has been characterized as more highly complex, information intensive, turbulent and uncertain than the low-technology manufacturing industry. This study concerns with the different characteristic of the high- vs. low-technology manufacturing industry has their specific consequences for innovation approach (greater innovation in the high-technology manufacturing industry accompanied by increased performance), and customer approach (gathering and reacting to information being more critical in high-technology markets in which more information is available and product cycle time can be reduced). Surprisingly, there has been little research empirically testing whether, for example, the performance impact of innovation capital is greater in the high-technology manufacturing industry than in the low-technology manufacturing industry. This study addresses these issues by examining the following research question: Is performance differentially affected by each capital separately (the innovation or customer capital main effects) and/or by their joint presence (the interaction between these two types of capital), depending on different industries. To summarize, this study has three parts. The study begins by reviewing the proposed framework and research hypotheses. The study describes the research design and discusses the research sample and key construct measures to be used. Finally, the findings are reported and the study concludes by discussing their practical and theoretical implications.

Most researchers posit primarily linear effects with no interactions for independent, orthogonal variables under a broad range of conditions (Song et al., 2005). Meanwhile, these results may mislead managers and researchers in that they may fail to consider the industry effect. The value of this analysis lies in demonstrating that internal and external resources (i.e., innovation capital and customer capital) and combinations of resources (i.e., the interaction of capitals) exert different effects on firm performance in different contexts (i.e., high- vs. low-technology manufacturing industry). These previous studies discuss the relationship between capital and performance from an intellectual capital perspective or RBV, and few have considered the environment context (e.g., Tseng and Goo, 2005). This study stresses the importance of the industrial characteristic and uses comparison analysis to examine the effects of innovation capital and customer capital influence on firm performance for high-technology vs. low-technology manufacturing firms. This makes this study move a step ahead of previous studies. 5.1. The main effects of innovation capital and customer capital The main effects of innovation capital and customer capital on firm performance are positive regardless of the industry. For innovation capital, the relationship of firm performance was equal in the high- vs. low-technology manufacturing industry (that is, this path was not moderated by industrial characteristic). For customer capital, the relationships differed between the two industries: the relationship of firm performance was stronger in the low-technology manufacturing industry. The firm performance impact of deploying customer capital was greater in the low-technology manufacturing industry, while the impact of deploying innovation capital on firm performance was the same across this particular industrial characteristic. In the low-technology manufacturing industry, the firm performance effects of innovation capital and customer capital were extremely similar, but in the high-technology manufacturing industry, the effect of innovation capital (γINN→PER=0.66) was not at all similar to that of customer capital (γCUS→PER=0.35) (see Table 5). These findings are similar to those in the work of Lynn et al. (1999). They point out that high-technology businesses rely on the internal resources (e.g., increasing R&D spending to strengthen innovation capital) of the firm, while low-technology businesses rely more heavily on resources external to the firm (e.g., conducting surveys to increase customer capital) in order to increase the possibility of more successful new product entries. Our findings also incrementally contribute to RBV, that is, under circumstances of limited resources, each firm manager should consider the contextual effects as well as appropriate capital investment to maximize firm value. Even if a firm already has superior competitive advantage with its own capital, this cannot guarantee that it will be able to sustain such competitive advantage in the market. For managers, the implications are clear. Managing capital investment (i.e., resource investment) based on industrial characteristic to achieve superior firm performance is essential. Competitive advantage need not be derived from rare, inimitable and nonsubstitutable resources; instead, competitive advantage can be derived from resources that are homogeneous across firms (Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000). In the high-technology manufacturing industry, innovation capital is considered important. Restated, in the high-technology manufacturing industry, firms should focus on innovation to upgrade firm performance, and if they emphasize improving customer capital efficiency instead of innovation, the resulting efficiency gains will be limited. 5.2. The interaction of innovation capital and customer capital The interaction effects are significant only in the high-technology manufacturing industry. The resource-based theory claims that complementary resources may enjoy synergistic performance impact, but this is rarely empirically tested. Thus, this study modeled the interaction's effect on performance in addition to the main effects. These investigations model the interaction effect on firm performance besides the main effects, and expect a positive interaction effect in both groups and a greater beta in the high-technology manufacturing firms but we found that the effect was significant only in the high-technology manufacturing firms. Clearly, resource combinations do not always lead to synergistic performance, and managers should therefore avoid over-investing in contexts where resources cannot be leveraged through configuration, complementarity, and/or integration. In terms of the resource-based theory, synergistic rents cannot always be obtained (γINX→PER=−0.25, n.s. at 0.0 5, see Table 5). Especially in the low-technology manufacturing industry, the interaction between innovation capital and customer capital does not significantly affect firm performance. The results also support the dynamic capability view's contention that in high-velocity markets, the outcomes of dynamic capabilities are particularly unpredictable (Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000). In the ever-changing high-technology industry, the integration of firm capital is especially important to achieve success. This result is in consonance with Song et al.'s (2005) finding that unpredictability may be attributable to the different capital synergistic effect, which is significant only in highly turbulent environments (e.g., high-technology firms). For managers, the implications include the following points. Since managers cannot always obtain sufficient resources for allocation, they should attempt to allocate innovation resources and customer resources investment more efficiently. In particular, managers in the low-technology manufacturing industry should adopt one of these two capital developments: innovation capital (see Table 5, γINN→PER=0.61) or customer capital (see Table 5, γCUS→PER=0.53) to avoid significantly impaired firm performance (see Table 5, γINX→PER=−0.25, column 3). Overall, the following picture emerges (see Table 5). In the low-technology manufacturing industry, innovation capital (γINN→PER=0.61) and customer capital (γCUS→PER=0.53) have similar main effects and no interaction effects. Meanwhile, in the high-technology manufacturing industry, customer capital (γCUS→PER=0.35) is lower than innovation capital (γINN→PER=0.66), and a significant interaction effect also exists (γINX→PER=0.31). This study also depicts a re-summarization of the findings in Fig. 2. The industrial characteristic moderates the impact of innovation capital and customer capital linkages on firm performance. Regarding the industrial characteristic moderated effect, previous studies focus on technological turbulence and market turbulence (e.g., Hanvanich et al., 2006; Menon et al., 1997). In different technological industries (high- vs. low-technology manufacturing industry), innovation capital and customer capital exert different effects on firm performance, possibly owing to differences in environmental turbulence (i.e., technological turbulence and market turbulence). Restated, firms in different industries face different degrees of technological turbulence and market turbulence, and make different levels of investment in innovation capital and customer capital. Furthermore, based on the structure-conduct-performance (SCP) paradigm ( Bain, 1956 and Bain, 1968; Mason, 1939), industry structure (i.e. industrial context) influences the conduct of industry members, which in turn determines overall industry performance. Context can be situational opportunities and constraints that affect the occurrence and meaning of organizational behavior as well as functional relationships between variables (Johns, 2006). According to Rousseau and Fried, “Contextualization entails linking observations to a set of relevant facts, events, or points of view that make possible research and theory that form part of a larger whole” (Rousseau and Fried, 2001, p. 1). Thus, how to respond to environmental (or industrial context) influences while maximizing various capital investments and responding appropriately to distribution behaviors is a decisive factor on firm performance. 5.3. Limitations and future research The main limitation of this study is that the empirical results do not explain whether or not managers should support the capital development. However, the capital represent an effective means which firms can use to exploit, protect, and develop competitive advantage (Hall, 1992). Simultaneously, managers make resource allocation decisions by balancing multiple pressures (Yoshikawa et al., 2005). For example, managers can make resource allocation decisions to cut R&D investments to improve immediate cash flows but not to respond to customer needs (Christensen, 2003). The danger is that cutting these investments during a period of poor firm performance may discourage employees from making future firm-specific investments and thus potentially damage long-term competitiveness. Consequently, during resource allocation, managers should not neglect firm properties and competitive position in the market. Though single-industry studies such as this one can provide some degree of control over the environmental peculiarities that confront individual organizations, it can also enhance the internal validity of a case study (McKee et al., 1989). But this single-industry sample may dilute the findings compared to a multi-industry study. Therefore, future studies should also consider other industries, such as financial services or other non-manufacturing industries.