Who are building technical knowledge mansions? Impact of patent cooperation networks on the generic technology R&D performance of emerging enterprises

Technological competition between firms has changed from ordinary to generic technology (hereinafter, GT) innovation with the increasing complementarity and shareability of technology in the field of emerging technologies. While facing the R&D dilemmas and market failure of GT and its R&D process, here comes the question: who are contributing to the GT R&D in the process of building emerging technology knowledge systems? Using social network analysis and a patent panel dataset of 380 strategic emerging firms, our study empirically examines how patent cooperation networks influence the R&D performance of GT, and the moderating effect of alliance heterogeneity. We found that: (1) The network scale and network centrality of patent cooperation networks have a positive and significant impact on the R&D performance of GT, and the latter one shows a greater impact, while the network density of patent cooperation networks shows a negative and significant impact on the R&D performance of GT. (2) Alliance heterogeneity plays a positive moderating role between the network scale and R&D performance of GT, while the moderating effect turns to be negative between the network density/network centrality of patent cooperation networks and R&D performance of GT. Our study contributes lay a foundation for strategic decision-making and government promotion of GT R&D.