중국 시장에서 개방형 혁신과 SCM의 연계: 고객 지향성과 공급업체 지향성을 중심으로

Since a very famous and distinguished economist, J. Schumpeter, suggested that ‘innovation,’ which means changing existing things in different ways or angles instead of following existing ways blindly, is an important source of competitive advantages of enterprises, it has been thought of as one important weapon for companies to get ahead in competitions. The concept of innovation has been more specifically coceptualized in two directions in Operation Management discipline. Utterback and Abernathy(1975) suggested two concepts in innovation of ‘product innovation’ and ‘process innovation.’ The former means that innovation in product design to satisfy customers’ needs which is related to the concept of customer orientation in this study, while the latter does that innovation in production process or workstations to improve efficiency like cost-saving effort. On the other hand, Supply Chain Management(SCM), which seeks to minimize supply chain level cost and to improve customer satisfaction by suppy chain member companies’ cooperation and collaboration, can be seen as another new approach in management and as another source of competitive advantage in modern management. Once again, there are two directions not only in research flows in SCM but also practicing SCM, which are called customer orientation and supplier orientation. Customer orientation means a direction of activities like making efforts and investing over a supply chain which focuses on customers’ satisfaction, while supplier orientation is other direction which focuses on cooperation and smooth collaboration with outside suppliers of a company or supply chain member. Although there have been many individual and independent researches on open innovation and customer and supplier orientation in SCM, it is not easy to find researches on the relationship between open innovation and two directions in SCM. We paid special attention on this current situation and wanted to make a breakthrough in existing research flow and that was the starting point of this study. We designed two-stage research model for this study. Our first stage goal of this research was focused on verifying if implementation of open innovation affects positively on corporate performance which are based on survey results from companies which are located in Chinese market which has very big market. Our goal in second stage of this study was to examine whether the effort and investment of companies on customer orientation and supplier orientation show positive moderating effect on the relationship between open innovation and corporate performances respectively. As the results of those procedures, we would find some relationships and combinations between open innovation and two directions in SCM more clearly to improve corporate performance and to provide managers with some implications and, moreover, intuitions to get ahead in competition over ever-changing and volatile business environment. As the result of conducting questionnaire surveys on 347 companies in Chinese market, we could verify that implementing open innovation affects positively corporate performance, which allows our first stage goal to be achieved. In the second stage of this study, we found that the effort on implementing customer orientation show positive moderating effect on the relationship between open innovation and corporate performance, while the effort on implementing supplier orientation does not. These results offer managers some managerial implications that companies need to make effort of open innovation and of customer orientation simultaneously to better improve performance because they, if combined, provide synergistic effect but that effort of supplier orientation does not that kind of effect.