Innovation Orientation: Comparison
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Mass entrepreneurship and innovation refer to encouraging the broad masses of the people, including industry, agriculture, commerce, education, and soldiers, to participate in entrepreneurship, encouraging all Chinese people to participate in innovation, which Premier Li Keqiang put forward at the 2014 Summer Davos Forum in Tianjin. After seven years of development, the innovation orientation of mass entrepreneurship and innovation has become an important engine leading China’s economic growth in the future.

  • innovation performance
  • organizational flexibility
  • innovation orientation
  • high-tech
  • SMEs

1. Introduction

Mass entrepreneurship and innovation refer to encouraging the broad masses of the people, including industry, agriculture, commerce, education, and soldiers, to participate in entrepreneurship, encouraging all Chinese people to participate in innovation, which Premier Li put forward at the 2014 Summer Davos Forum in Tianjin [1]. After the introduction of mass entrepreneurship and innovation, China’s scientific and technological strength and innovation ability have been greatly improved. The whole society’s R&D investment has increased from RMB 1.42 trillion in 2015 to RMB 2.4 trillion in 2020. The R&D investment intensity will reach about 3% in 2020, of which the basic research expenditure will nearly double that in 2015. The contribution rate of scientific and technological progress will exceed 60% in 2020. The proportion of citizens with scientific quality exceeds 10%. According to the global innovation index, released by the world intellectual property organization, China’s ranking jumped from 29th in 2015 to 14th in 2020 [2]. In the meantime, the industry and academic circles have responded with the conscientious implementation of all localities and departments. Various new industries, new models, and new formats are emerging, which has effectively stimulated social vitality, released great creativity, and become a highlight of economic development [3]. It can be seen that the orientation effect of mass entrepreneurship and innovation is obvious.
Schumpeter [4][5] claims innovation is a revolutionary change. Drucker [6] believes innovation is a behavior that endows resources with new wealth creation ability. Many empirical studies show that start-ups are the source of innovation. These enterprises initially completed the commercialization of many major technologies and inventions in history. Mass entrepreneurship and innovation turn scientific and technological achievements into real productive forces.
Innovation orientation can improve the efficiency and competitiveness of enterprises, glow the entrepreneurial spirit, create high-quality products and services that can stimulate the needs of consumers, meet new needs, open up new markets, promote the vigorous development of new technologies, new industries, and new formats, and accelerate the transformation of development momentum [7].
The academic circles believe that the innovation orientation reflects the attitude of the market, the government, and enterprises towards changes in things and new ideas, as well as the open attitude of enterprises towards new technologies, new resources, and new management systems and the tendency to innovate. Innovation orientation helps enterprises overcome obstacles and achieve sustainable development [8]. Entrepreneurship orientation also profoundly impacts organizational innovation [9].
From above, the existing literature confirms that innovation orientation positively affects enterprises’ innovation performance. However, innovation orientation is more likely directional guidance of possibility. Will it have a positive impact on enterprise innovation? What are essential factors that affect the development of the enterprise? How does it affect the innovation performance of enterprises? These studies are inconclusive. Behind the achievements created by the innovation and entrepreneurship policy, there is still a foam economy and false packaging [10]. In order to obtain national support and funds, the 100,000 projects were described as 100 million, and the three million investment was described as 30 million. Enterprises were built blindly, and immature technologies were introduced to the market. Only six months after the occurrence of the COVID-19, from February to August 2020, China’s high-tech enterprises were withdrawn, reaching 66,000. The cancellation rate was 4.5% [11], higher than the overall level of manufacturing and producer services.
Freeman, 2013, [12] stated that the innovation process is characterized by randomness, contingency, and arbitrariness. Due to the technological instability of innovation and the wrong estimation of the future market and competition. All of those would lead to innovation failure.
Technical uncertainty refers to the technical uncertainty of the success of an innovation. Market uncertainty refers to whether innovation results will be welcomed in the market after it is technically successful [12].
This uncertainty will lead to unforeseen accidents that are difficult to predict according to experience analysis and the impact of previous technical achievements. The technical capability of an organization may be locked in [13].
For those enterprises with R&D, production, marketing, and other organizational and functional departments, if they want to achieve commercial success through product and process innovation, they need close and continuous communication and mutual adaptation between various departments.
In addition, successful business innovation also requires rapid decision-making and close integration and coordination of research, development, production, sales, and services.
Flexibility reflects an organization’s “potential ability” to deal with environmental uncertainty. This “potential capability” includes the organization’s decision-making response capability and realization response capability in the face of environmental uncertainty and the degree of coordination within the organization.

2. Innovation Orientation

Since the late 20th century, most economies have entered the “innovation-driven” stage. Innovation is the most effective way for organizations to obtain a competitive market advantage and realize sustainable development [14][15][16]. Innovation is the process of generating innovative ideas and implementing creative behavior. Its essence is reflected in organizational innovation performance. Agi, M. A., and Jha, A. K., [17] define innovation performance as when employees consciously create, introduce, and apply innovative ideas in their work roles, teams, or organizations to improve the innovation performance of parts, teams, or organizations. Hurley and Hult [8] defined innovation orientation based on organizational culture: innovation orientation mainly reflects the openness of corporate culture. Its important connotation lies in whether the enterprise supports and encourages innovation at the level of values [18]. Innovation orientation is the initial stage of creation. For enterprises with a strong innovation orientation, their members are willing to adopt innovative ideas and innovative things. Innovation orientation is the key for enterprises to overcome Key drivers of innovation barriers [19]. The innovation orientation in this entry specifically refers to the guiding role of mass entrepreneurship and innovation policies in the direction of technology R&D, path selection, factor prices, and the allocation of various innovation factors. Existing studies have shown that innovation promotes high-tech small and medium-sized enterprises to constantly update knowledge and technology as the basis and premise for building competitive advantage [20][21]. On the one hand, innovation helps high-tech SMEs to correctly understand the value of knowledge and technology [22], form a consensus to pay attention to knowledge and technology, sensitively develop and master key new knowledge and technology, realize the value of knowledge and technology with open and new thinking, and continuously improve the technical capacity of small and medium-sized enterprises [23]. On the other hand, the research also shows that innovation orientation creates an innovative atmosphere in entrepreneurial teams. Innovation atmosphere plays a crucial role in cultivating creativity and is a necessary condition for improving the technological capability of start-ups [24]. The innovation atmosphere can also stimulate the work motivation and efficiency of entrepreneurial individuals, facilitate the transformation and integration of complementarity and tacit knowledge within the entrepreneurial team, and improve the technological capability of entrepreneurial enterprises [25]. To sum up, it can be seen from the existing research that innovation orientation plays an important role in innovation performance, but in the process of innovation orientation playing a role in innovation performance, does organization management play a role? What does it do? The research has not been concluded yet. It should be noted that implementing policies is often inseparable from the organization’s response, decision-making and implementation. In particular, China’s high-tech SMEs have an obvious bureaucratic system and face the policies, perplexing the innovation management of enterprises. Whether the market accepts the funds for developing new technologies and new products? How do you allocate various resources within an organization? How to deal with the opposition of organization members? What strategies should be adopted to win the support and necessary resources from the top? How do you keep a reasonable expectation for the organization? The school of national innovation system suggests that government is the internal factor of technological innovation. According to Freeman’s theory, a complete innovation system comprises government, enterprises, education, industry, and other factors. Among them, the government can influence other factors in many ways. Therefore, relying solely on market guidance to promote a country’s technological innovation is not enough. The government should allocate resources, create the environment and encourage technological innovation from a strategic perspective to promote enterprise innovation. Innovation is not a single subject. As the main undertaker of public technology construction, the government plays an irreplaceable role in innovation. The government can effectively promote the innovative behavior of enterprises through scientific and technological support, tax incentives, and government procurement. Drucker believes that there are two kinds of innovation: one is technological innovation. It finds new applications for some natural objects in nature and endows them with new economic value. However, an organization’s technology exists in the organizational system and habits of managing and coordinating tasks. These systems and habits are called organizational conventions. Innovation accumulation often leads to path dependence-research follows a specific technical trajectory. On the other hand, organizational knowledge such as past innovation models and practices will impact future innovation decisions [26]. Freeman also believes that the innovation process is random, accidental, and arbitrary. Because of the instability of innovation technology and the wrong estimation of future market and competition, innovation will fail. Continuous innovation promotes organizational flexibility and eliminates the negative impact of core rigidity on competitive and innovation performance advantages [27][28]. Flexibility promotes the technological upgrading of enterprises and the integration of various resources. At the same time, with the change in environment and market, new technology R&D and innovation activities promote flexible management of organizations and enhance “anti-enterprise” vulnerability capability [29]. Therefore, the guiding role of technological innovation needs resource flexibility as a bridge. What is more, the other is social innovation. It creates a new management organization, management mode, or management means in the economy and society ‚ Thus, great economic and social value are obtained in allocating resources. Due to the flexibility of strategy and organization, out of the rapid response to the market, flexibly adjust the organizational strategy and various guidelines and policies to improve the innovation performance level of the enterprise. In the S–C–P (Structure–Conduct–Performance) paradigm, the performance of enterprises is completely determined by the environment [30][31]. However, under the same external environment, internal resources and capabilities enable some enterprises to gain more advantages and performance [32][33]. According to the competence-based theory [34], flexible organizational capability is a scarce resource that is difficult to imitate and will affect competitive advantage. Therefore, it is reasonable to believe that the role of social innovation orientation needs capacity flexibility. In other words, exploring the relationship between innovation orientation and innovation performance of high-tech SMEs under the intermediary of resource and capacity flexibility is necessary and significant.

References

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