Analysis on the Development of Automation and Intelligence in China’s Manufacturing Industry—Taking R & D Collaboration among Automobile Enterprises

Abstract

With the development of intelligence for automated automobile industries in China, the traditional R&D mode of enterprise has evolved from integrated internal innovation within a single enterprise to collaborative innovation among enterprises, which makes enterprises break the limit of the organizational boundaries to seek for the right partners and cooperation. However, the R&D environment among business partners and the mismatch between R&D and management have greatly affected the development of intelligence for automated industrial. Based on synergetic, from the perspective of collaborative R&D among automobile companies, this paper takes the collaborative R&D between Renault-Nissan Alliance and Dongfeng Motor Group as the research object, conducting quantitative analysis using regression models and structural equation models with 423 valid questionnaires collected in three months (from October 2017 to May 2018), and attempting to reveal the situational context in the distributed innovation network as well as how the dynamic collaborative behaviors among R&D enterprises act on “collaborative R&D performance.” The results show that first, the four “collaborative contexts”–strategic context, cultural context, institutional context, and network context–have a significant positive correlation with the level of collaborative R&D; second, the three “collaborative behaviors”—knowledge sharing, information sharing, and specific asset investment—have a significant positive correlation with the level of knowledge growth; and third, the level of collaborative R&D and knowledge growth have a significant positive correlation with R&D performance. Thus, it is revealed that not only are there situational contexts among the R&D and innovation activities of the core enterprises but also dynamic collaborative behavior. This creates a new perspective for the research on the development of intelligence for automated automobile industries in China among automobile companies.