參與科技專案廠商之組織學習、社會資本與技術移轉之實證研究

Organizational Learning, Social Capital and Technology Transfer: An Empirical Study on Firms Participating R&D Consortia

方世杰(Shih-Chieh Fang) ； 林麗娟(Julia L. Lin)

《管理學報》 22卷3期 (2005/06) Pp. 295-315

https://doi.org/10.6504/JOM.2005.22.03.02

摘要

面臨技術快速變動以及日趨複雜化的動態競爭環境，廠商透由組織間合作研發的方式，可以有效地、快速地取得與移轉所需技術。本研究從組織間關係網路之觀點，強調廠商在此一特定系絡的合作研發網路鑲嵌中，建構一定程度的社會資本以有效利用網路資源與網路學習之機會，並結合廠商內部之組織學習，將有助於其技術移轉績效之提昇。在實證研究方面，本文以110家參與工研院所主導之科技專案之組織間合作研發聯盟爲研究對象，以問卷調查統計分析方法探討組織學習、社會資本與技術移轉績效之因果關係。本文的主要結論包括：(1)廠商之組織學習是提昇技術移轉績效的充分與必要條件；(2)社會資本的建構對技術移轉績效之影響較不顯著。唯某些社會資本要素（如居網路之核心位置、網路關係聯結數、與關係品質等）結合某些特定組織學習能力（如學習意圖與吸收能力），將有強化技術移轉績效之互補效果。本文最後亦就本研究之理論與實務意涵做一討論，並提出管理實務與學術研究方向上之建議。

關鍵字

科技專案 ； 組織學習 ； 社會資本 ； 技術移轉

並列摘要

It is now widely recognized that, to survive and thrive in competitive environments, firms must keep upgrading their core technologies. In contrast to develop the core technology internally, acquiring the technology externally is a fast, low-risk and effective way. To sustain their competitive advantage, firms must seek cooperative relationships with other firms to acquire the critical technologies rather than only purchase the standardized technologies or patents from market. Transferring technology externally from joint ventures, strategic alliances, or R&D consortia, is particularly significant for the Taiwanese small-medium enterprises as they have been upgrading from OEM to ODM or even to OBM.
There has been a growing body of research focusing on technology transfer for decades. However, some fundamental questions of technology transfer require more attention. First, social capital is an important perspective in explaining the technology transfer and knowledge acquiring from R&D collaboration because of the tacitness and distinctness characteristics of technology and knowledge. Secondly, most prior studies have focused on the dyadic relationship between firm and research institution, but ignored the effects of position of an individual firm in the network. Although firms can facilitate the technology transfer by developing relationships with other partners in strategic R&D networks, firms must also have effective organizational learning to secure and exploit the technology they have acquired.
In other words, firms first can leverage interorganizational relationships to obtain the critical resource through network learning and then improve performance of technology transfer. In addition, firms have to construct effective organizational learning internally to internalize the acquired knowledge from external networks. In attempting to explore the process and performance of technology transfer in R&D consortia, we integrate the social capital and organizational learning issues to examine their effects on technology transfer while social capital refers to firms' external capability and organizational learning refers to firms' internal capability. Our research questions include: 1) How does firms' social capital with external partners in R&D consortium affect performance of technology transfer? 2) How does firms' internal capability of organizational learning affect performance of technology transfer? And 3) Are the effects of social capital and the organizational learning on the performance of technology transfer complementary?
Based on an empirical investigation on 110 firms participating ITRI-sponsored R&D consortia, we find: 1) Firms capabilities of organizational learning, including learning intent, absorptivity and knowledge integration capability, have positive effects on performance of technology transfer. 2) Among the concepts of social capital, only centrality has positive effects on market advantage of technology transfer, and number of linkage, relationship quality and shared norm within network have positive effects on technology advantage. 3) Some concepts of organizational learning and social capital have complementary effects on technology transfer performance. For examples, firms with central position in network and better relationship quality can facilitate the technology transfer performance if they also have stronger intent and aborptivity. In additions, firms with more linkage and stronger relationship have better technology advantage if their learning intent and aborptivity are stronger. 4) Firms with long-term interaction ITRI have better technology advantage of technology transfer and on the other hand, firms with social capital developed mainly from the interaction with other partners participating the same consortium, have better market performance.
Theoretically, we first conclude that firms, to sustain competitive advantage, must not only leverage the external interorganizational relationships, but also improve their organizational learning internally. Secondly, we argue social relationships can be capital and liability as well. Firms have to evaluate the appropriateness and effectiveness of constructing social capital as it is costly and oversociallized is inefficient. Lastly, the effects of external social capital and internal organizational learning on technology transfer are complementary rather than substitute.
We present some suggestions for practice. First, organizational learning capability is the fundamental issue of technology transfer While evaluating whether and how to develop social capital, firms have to improve their organizational learning by optimizing the resource allocations due to the availability of resources and some constraints. It takes long time for firms to construct social capital and the benefits are not immediate. Furthermore, it is beneficial for firms to keep long-term relationship with ITRI.
The first contribution of this study is combining the network perspective and organizational learning to understand the cooperation between firms and research institutions. It is an important issue for firms to leverage external relationships and strengthen internal organizational learning as well in this co-opetitive environment. Most prior studies have focused on the dyad relationship between firm and firm, or firm and research institution. We, adopting the network embeddeness perspective, explicate firms' strategic role in network and distinguish the relationships between ”firm and firm” and ”firm and research institution.”

並列關鍵字

Organizational learning ； Social capital ； Technology transfer ； R&D consortia

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