HOW INDUSTRY NETWORK AND HIERARCHY POSITIONS INFLUENCE INNOVATION IN GLOBAL SEMICONDUCTOR INDUSTRY.

In contrast to focusing on the social ties of individual actor in the conventional social network analysis, we explore, in this research, how a firm's industrial network position and industry hierarchy position, based on its institutional ties, influences the firm's technological innovation. Using network data containing firm level and processing by UCINET software, we first compute network property variables and then draw digraphs of the global semiconductor industry. The empirical result shows that, in the global semiconductor industry, a firm's network position advantages (betweeness centrality and indegree prestige but not outdegree prestige) will influence the firm's technological innovation and its hierarchy position will moderate the above relationship. Implications of the results and suggestions for further research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]