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

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Knowledge recombination
• new product performance
• intellectual property protections

Acknowledgement

The author will be very grateful to the Editors and anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. This research is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation of China (No. 71233002).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation of China (No. 71233002).

Notes on contributors

Peizhen Chen

Peizhen Chen is a lecturer at the School of Economics and Management, Changsha University. He graduated from the Business School of Hunan University. His research interests focus on technological innovation, knowledge management and collaboration network. His work has been published in Journal of Industry-University Collaboration and many top-tier Chinese management-related journals.