How External Knowledge Acquisition Contribute to Innovation Performance: A Chain Mediation Model

It has become a common way for enterprises to use external knowledge to reduce the development bottleneck caused by internal resource constraints. How does external knowledge develop inside enterprises and then promote the innovation performance? Drawing upon resource-based view and dynamic capability theory, this study proposes a chain mediation model of how firms’ opportunity identification and R&D, as two distinctive microfoundations of dynamic capabilities, mediate the relationship between external knowledge acquisition and firms’ innovation performance. Through the questionnaire survey of Chinese high-tech enterprises, the results show that both external market knowledge acquisition and external technological knowledge acquisition influence the level of opportunity identification and internal R&D activities, so that the internal knowledge base of the enterprise can be updated or reconstructed, and the innovation performance can be improved. This further confirms that enterprises transform external knowledge with the role of dynamic capabilities, which enriches the research on open innovation from the perspective of dynamic capabilities.