Research on Technological Divisive Faultlines in Cliques: Evidence From China’s Biomedical Industry Innovation Network

Social identity theory and self-classification theory provide theoretical supports for explaining the formation and action of the technological divisive faultlines. The purpose of this study is to explore the effects of technological divisive faultlines on a clique’s innovation performance and the moderating effects of geographical proximity and closeness centrality. The data of 119 firm alliance and 351 firms in cliques are collected in China’s biomedical industry from 2010-2017. Then, we perform the negative binomial regression by STATA software with these data as samples. The results show that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between the technological divisive faultlines and clique’s innovation performance; geographical proximity has no moderating effect on the inverted U-shaped relationship; closeness centrality has a significant negative moderating effect on the inverted U-shaped relationship between them. Besides, it suggests that the clique’s innovation performance under high closeness centrality is higher than that under low closeness centrality, which provides a new perspective for the previous research that forming cliques could break the relational redundancy.