Innovation diffusion within the supply chain : a study of Chinese apparel firms in Shenzhen

Abstract

Supply chain management directly affects corporate performance. Today's supply chain management is vastly different from what it was a decade ago; nowadays, developing and implementing a networked, flexible supply chain that integrates all partners-manufacturers, retailers, suppliers, carriers, and vendors-into a seamless unit is the crucial step in meeting ongoing customer demand and maintaining a competitive edge. Therefore, supply chain integration has attracted enormous attention from business people as well as marketing and supply chain researchers.

However, effective supply chain integration can not be achieved unless the different components involved in this approach are coordinated. In order to find out how to coordinate the different supply chain components, the first step in this research is to study the supply chain management literatures to explore the key drivers of supply chain integration.

In the future, supply chain management will have to deliver remarkably higher levels of performance so that increasing demanding business requirements can be met. Although the drivers of supply chain integration can be a driving force for corporation growth, the abuse of these drivers can not meet the real world challenge if companies or supply chain partners are still doing business in the conventional way. As the traditional ways of growing business erode, companies will very much depend on innovations to build up competitive advantages and carry out a holistic, fully integrated approach to their supply chain designs. By doing so, the management sectors of supply chain integration can replace conventional, functional, silo-limited thinking with the pursuit of flexibility and effectiveness. Therefore, this research goes the second step to study the literatures of innovation and points out the goodness of innovation as well as evaluates the diffusion of innovation. Through the diffusion study, one important feature is discussed that the diffusion of innovations are unavoidably influenced by the situational factors that embedded in the environment that innovations take place in. Apply the underlined feature into this research, it means that when innovation diffusion takes place within the supply chain setting, drivers of supply chain integration will probably impact on the innovation diffusion processes.

This research is carried out in the Chinese apparel industry in Shenzhen. In order to achieve a higher level respondent rate, this research uses the personal managed questionnaires. 148 questionnaires are collected to meet the need of 140. The results of the study shows that supply chain integration has a positive relationship with innovation diffusion; the two supply chain 'integration governance mechanisms argued by this research are supported by the linear regression test; furthermore, the two supply chain integration governance mechanisms do impact on the innovation diffusion processes. However, the importance of the two different supply chain integration drivers vary with the changes of respondent's supply chain working experiences as well as the changes of firm sizes.