创新对于企业发展、产业转型和国家竞争优势塑造的重要作用得到理论和实践界的一致认可,但在技术竞争加剧的环境下,通过技术手段领先竞争者以维持企业增长和竞争力的可能性正在下降,非技术领域(如战略理念和管理实践)的创新正逐步成为企业竞争中更为关键的核心要素。但关于战略柔性与创新之间关系的研究往往局限在技术创新领域,大量已有研究基于动态能力理论探讨战略柔性对企业技术创新的作用,缺乏对非技术创新的探讨。基于资源基础理论和动态能力理论,将战略柔性分为资源柔性和协调柔性两个雏度,构建这两个维度与战略创新和管理创新两种非技术形式创新之间关系的整合性研究框架,探讨战略柔性对战略创新和管理创新影响的差异化路径关系、与战略创新和管理创新之间的因果路径关系,以及战略创新在战略柔性与管理创新之间的中介作用机制。以303份中国制造业企业配对调研数据为样本,采用结构方程模型,对7个假设进行实证检验。研究结果表明,战略柔性对战略创新和管理创新均存在积极影响,战略创新能够促进管理创新的培育;战略柔性对战略创新和管理创新的作用路径存在差异,即对战略创新通过直接路径施加影响,对管理创新除直接效应外,还存在以战略创新为中介的间接影响路径,即战略创新在战略柔性与管理创新之间起部分中介作用。通过构建战略柔性对两种非技术创新的影响框架,呼吁增加对创新研究中非技术创新的关注,促进企业内部创新系统中战略创新与管理创新两种不同层面创新之间的双向理论融合,并为提高和重塑中国制造业竞争优势提供关键的实践指导。
The significance of innovations to firm growth, industry development, and national competitive advantage has received consistent and extensive recognition from scholars and practitioners. However, faced with the increasingly intense technology race, it is becoming less and less likely for any firm, industry, and nation to remain competitive or gain competitiveness through the advancement of technology beyond the competitors' reach. In this instance, non-technological innovation, such as strategic innovation and management innovation, had grown to be the core of the competition. Extant research into the influences of strate- gic flexibility, one key component of dynamic capabilities, on firm innovation is largely restricted to the field of technological in- novation, lacking enough scholarly insights into how strategic flexibility impacts non-technological innovation, such as strategic innovation and management innovation. Built on resource based theory and dynamic capability theory, this study introduces art integrated framework on the influence of two dimensions of strategic flexibility, that is resource flexibility and coordination flexibility, on two types of non-technological innovation, that is strategic innovation and management innovation. We further examine the differential effects of strategic flexi- bility on strategic innovation and management innovation, the interrelationship between strategic innovation and management inno- vation, and the mediating role strategic innovation plays between strategic flexibility and management innovation. To examine the seven hypotheses proposed from the theoretical model, we collected empirical data from 303 paired manufacturing enterprises from mainland China with two key informants for each firm, and tested the model with structural equation modeling technique. Results indicate that strategic flexibility is beneficial to both strategic innovation and management innovation, strategic inno- vation positively influences management innovation, and strategic flexibil