Effects of inventive capabilities on new product development performance: the knowledge combination view
Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management
ISSN: 1741-038X
Article publication date: 5 July 2022
Issue publication date: 22 September 2022
Abstract
Purpose
A firm's inventions provide technical information for product planning and technical support for new product development (NPD). In the knowledge-based theory, inventing is regarded as a process of knowledge combination. This paper aims to classify the firm's inventive capabilities based on the combinatorial view and investigate the effects of inventive capabilities on NPD performance.
Design/methodology/approach
Four types of inventive capabilities are identified concerned with the knowledge used to combine in the inventive activities. By utilizing a dataset of 572 firms from China's automotive manufacturing industry, the roles of different inventive activities in the generation of new inventions are compared. Then the effects of different inventive capabilities on NPD performance are empirically examined by using negative binomial regression analysis.
Findings
The time series for the number of patented inventions derived from different types of combinations generally exhibits a steady upward trend, and the number of patents derived from recombination is much higher. The empirical results demonstrate that the inventive capabilities associated with reused recombination and creative recombination exhibit positive effects on NPD performance, and the inventive capabilities associated with novel combination and original combination exhibit non-linear effects on NPD performance.
Originality/value
The findings contribute to NPD literature by investigating the effects of different inventive capabilities on NPD performance. This study also provides guidelines for manufacturing managers to improve NPD performance by building appropriate inventive capabilities.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work was funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No: 71902059); Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province (No: 2020JJ5379) and Hunan Key Laboratory of Macroeconomic Big Data Mining and its Application. The authors would like to thank the editor and three anonymous referees for useful suggestions.
Citation
Xu, L., Yin, X., Gong, H. and Zeng, D. (2022), "Effects of inventive capabilities on new product development performance: the knowledge combination view", Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management, Vol. 33 No. 7, pp. 1277-1300. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMTM-12-2021-0504
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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