Inter-Firm Innovation Networks: The Impact of Scale-Free Property on Firm Innovation

摘要

Enterprise alliance network is considered to have scale-free property. This paper aims to study the correlation between scale-free property and enterprise innovation performance. Networks of alliances in automobile industry are constructed, and then researchers utilize Maximum Likelihood Estimation and KS-test to calculate the p value of the network's scale-free property. Negative binomial regression model is used to analyze the relevance between enterprise innovative performance and the scale-free property of alliance network, with patents number that firms have applied as the indicator of firms' innovative performance. Experiment result shows that scale-free attribute of enterprise alliance network has quite a significant positive effect upon enterprise innovative performance.