Research on social networks has demonstrated that firms in a changing environment will benefit from innovation networks. However, the lack of consensus on what factors and how these factors impact the performance impedes further research in this area. In this paper, the concept of international innovation network and its performance are clarified. Then, based on reviews of the social network and knowledge management literatures, especially along with the results of previous empirical studies, we clarify the relationships between the performance of focal firm entering international innovation network and each configuration, such as network structure (range and density), network relationship (tie strength, duration, and norm distance), and network position (centrality). We conduct case studies from the Chinese software industry to test our conclusions, and then propose an integrative model. We also propose some efforts that the firm can make in order to improve its performance. At the end, the future research following this study is discussed.

(pdf)