1 Introduction
In recent years, scholars have found that the internal foundation of enterprise diversification is technological diversification, and the technological capability of enterprises is the most important force to promote enterprise diversification, and the technological paradigm determines the business leadership of enterprises, so the technological capability of enterprises has an important impact on the implementation of diversification strategy. As one of the sources of enterprise's long-term competitive advantage, the construction and maintenance of enterprise's technical ability consumes a lot of manpower and material resources, while the resources used by enterprises to build technical ability are limited. Different types of diversification strategies require enterprises to allocate limited resources and technologies in different ways. For example, a single business enterprise concentrates all resources and technologies on a single business, while non-related business enterprises disperse resources and technologies to businesses in different industries. Therefore, enterprises that implement different types of diversification strategies have different levels of resource input when building and developing technologies, so their technical capabilities are also different.
When enterprises implement different diversification strategies, they learn and absorb external knowledge and technology to meet the needs of strategy implementation. The knowledge and technology needed to implement any strategy are different in content and quantity. For example, the implementation of a single business strategy does not need to learn other professional technologies that are very different from the existing technologies, rather than the implementation of related business strategies. It certainly requires enterprises to learn and absorb various new technologies and knowledge from the outside.
Therefore, considering the allocation of internal resources and the learning and absorption of external resources, it is not clear which diversification strategy will be more conducive to the improvement of technological capabilities of enterprises. The existing research mainly focuses on the influence of diversification strategy on enterprise performance and enterprise value and the choice of different strategic types, but does not involve the influence of diversification strategy on enterprise technical ability. This paper studies the influence of diversification strategy on the technological capability of enterprises, which can make up for this research vacancy.
On the basis of existing research, this paper links the diversification strategy of enterprises with the technological capability of enterprises, and combines the empirical analysis of relevant data to solve the following two questions: What is the relationship between diversification strategy and technological capability of enterprises? How does the R&D intensity of an enterprise adjust the relationship between diversification strategy and technological capability?
The research significance of this paper lies in: (1) filling the gap in the research on the influence of diversification strategy on the technological capability of enterprises; It is clear about the differences in technical capabilities of various diversification strategies and the types of strategies that are most conducive to improving the technical capabilities of enterprises, so as to provide reference for enterprises to choose appropriate diversification strategies to enhance their competitiveness.
2 theoretical analysis and assumptions
2. 1 concept
Diversification strategy is a kind of business strategy widely adopted by modern enterprises, which means that enterprises enter two or more related or unrelated product fields for development. There are many ways to classify diversification strategies, among which diversification strategies are divided into single business strategy, leading business strategy, related business strategy and unrelated business strategy. Rumelt divides diversification strategy into related diversification strategy and unrelated diversification strategy.
Technical ability includes macro and micro meanings. Macro-technical capability refers to national technical capability, while micro-technical capability refers to enterprise technical capability. The research object of this paper is the technical ability of enterprises. The technological capability of an enterprise is its knowledge and skills in technical resources and activities.
2.2 the relationship between diversification strategy and enterprise technical capabilities
Generally speaking, enterprises can improve and expand their technological capabilities by learning the technology of other organizations. The technological development of enterprises is carried out along the original technological development track of enterprises, that is, technological development has path dependence. Technical trajectory is a "conventional" problem-solving activity within the scope of technical paradigm. When the knowledge to be learned is related to the existing knowledge of the enterprise, its learning effect is the best. Wu Guisheng and others believe that the more similar the learning object is to the existing knowledge and technology, the less difficulties learners need to overcome, the higher the learning efficiency, the better the learning effect and the lower the learning cost. If enterprises implement diversification strategy, they must learn knowledge and technology related to new business to meet the needs of this business operation. The greater the span between the existing business and the new business, the smaller the correlation, and the greater the technical separation between the existing technology and the technology to be learned. Therefore, the greater the difficulty of technological learning, the worse the effect of technological learning, and the slower the improvement of technological capabilities of enterprises.
To a great extent, enterprises hope to share their existing knowledge and technology among various businesses in order to realize the synergistic effect of knowledge and technology. However, the transfer of knowledge and technology within enterprises is limited by many factors, one of which is knowledge stickiness. Knowledge stickiness was put forward by von Hipple, who thought that knowledge stickiness was all the costs in the process of obtaining, transferring and applying technical information in a new place. Zhang Li found that there is a negative correlation between knowledge stickiness and technology transfer performance. This "stickiness" phenomenon exists in the process of technology transfer between different organizations and between different departments or individuals within the same organization. Therefore, the transfer of knowledge and technology inside and outside the enterprise requires costs. With the deepening of diversification, the technology separation between businesses operated by enterprises increases, and the transfer cost of knowledge and technology between businesses, that is, the stickiness of knowledge, increases, making it more difficult for enterprises to realize knowledge and technology transfer, so the effect and efficiency of knowledge and technology transfer will also become worse.
From the perspective of resource allocation, single business strategy tends to concentrate resources and technology on a specific business, while diversification strategy is to allocate resources and technology to different businesses. The research shows that the strategy of resource diversification will encourage enterprises to invest excessively through the internal capital market, and make enterprises tend to invest surplus capital in businesses with worrying prospects. Therefore, the way of resource allocation brought by diversification strategy is easy to waste resources, which does not conform to the principle of maximizing resource utilization efficiency and is not conducive to the improvement of enterprise technical ability.
3 Conclusion and discussion
This paper finds that the older an enterprise is, the longer its internal technology accumulates and the more it accumulates. The senior managers of the old enterprise attach more importance to R&D activities, and the R&D intensity within the enterprise is greater, so the overall technical ability level of the enterprise is higher.
At the same time, this paper proves that there are significant differences in the technological capabilities of enterprises adopting different types of diversification strategies. The implementation of single business strategy is most beneficial to the improvement of enterprise's technical ability, while unrelated business strategy is most unfavorable to the improvement of enterprise's technical ability. The implementation of leading business strategy and related business strategy will slow down the improvement of enterprise's technical ability to a certain extent. Therefore, this study proves that the excessive diversification of business operation is not conducive to the improvement of the overall technical ability of enterprises.
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