Recombinant reuse or recombinant creation? The impact of knowledge recombination strategies on new product performance

This article aims to analyse the relationship between the recombinant reuse and creation of firms and incremental/breakthrough new product (INP & BNP) performance. This article also attempts to examine whether the relationships between them are moderated by local intellectual property protections. We collected data of automobile manufacturers of Chinese from 2001 to 2014. The results indicate that recombinant reuse has a positive impact on INP performance, while the relationships between recombinant creation and INP & BNP performance is inverted U-shaped. Furthermore, the results reveal that the negative moderating effect of local intellectual property protections between the relationship of recombinant reuse and INP performance; the higher the local intellectual property protections, the steeper the inverted U-shaped relationship between recombinant creation and INP/BNP performance will be.