2025/11/25 by Ruihong Liu, Xiu-Hao Ding, Xiu‐Hao Ding
Business, Management and Accounting · #Innovation and Knowledge Management #International Business and FDI #Outsourcing and Supply Chain Management
paper · doi:10.1109/tem.2025.3637024
openalex created_date 2025/11/25 · openalex publication_date 2025/11/25 · crossref created 2025/11/25 · crossref deposited 2025/12/24 · crossref issued 2026/01/01 · crossref published 2026/01/01 · crossref published-print 2026/01/01 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/11 · crossref indexed 2026/08/01
As the locus of value creation increasingly occurs at the interfaces among various parties, firms stress inbound innovation with supply chain partners. Complementing studies that investigate inbound innovation with supply chain partners from network and relationship perspectives, this study concentrates on the focal firms' friendly actions. Employing social exchange theory and media richness theory, this study proposes that outbound operation information sharing and IT channel diversity contribute to the firms' inbound innovation with supply chain partners. Moreover, as outbound operation information sharing, IT channel diversity, and internal R&D capability are key factors at different stages of inbound innovation with supply chain partners, this study also examines their interactive effects on inbound innovation with supply chain partners. Employing the 2012 enterprise surveys data set of China and hierarchical multiple regression, the empirical results support our arguments. Moreover, the results remain consistent throughout robustness analyses and further mechanism analyses. Our findings highlight the importance of firms' friendly actions and their complementary effects with the internal capabilities in enhancing firms' inbound innovation with supply chain partners.