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External Knowledge Inflow Promotes Product Innovation Performance from the Perspective of Business Creativity

External knowledge inflow is an innovation process because it enables a company to absorb and use knowledge from the external environment. External knowledge has profound effect on business product innovation. This effect is mainly displayed in the following two aspects:( 1) providing a solid knowledge base for RD activities by obtaining the latest market information,and( 2)integrating both internal and external knowledge and transforming them into innovative ideas. However,most previous researches focus on external knowledge inflow's direct impact on product innovation and ignore its potential influence on corporate creativity. To close the knowledge gap,this paper analyses the impact of external knowledge inflow on the innovation performance of new products via corporate creativity.Firstly,this paper explains the formation of corporate creativity and points out the distinction between corporate creativity and corporate innovation. We illustrate that corporate creativity is the "activity"which is not putting into practice with the intention and corporate innovation is the activity taking place via corporate creativity. Secondly,this paper classifies corporate creativity into two dimensions — product creativity and marketing creativity,and categorizes external knowledge into the dimensions of technological knowledge and marketing knowledge. This paper further discusses the mechanism of external knowledge and corporate creativity that can be used to increase the performance of new product innovation. In the theoretical model building part,the paper proposes seven theoretical assumptions about the relationship among external knowledge inflow,corporate creativity,product innovation,a variety of parametric and nonparametric statistical methods. The results of statistical analysis are presented in figures and tables to improve our understanding. The empirical results show that corporate creativity has a mediation effect on the relationships between external knowledge inflow and product performance. There are different mediation effects because business creativity has different dimensions. In addition,there are also differences between mediations caused by firm size and R D investment. The paper also finds that the higher uncertainty of external environment for enterprises,the greater hindrance of the inflow of external technical knowledge that can be used to promote product creativity. However,it plays a catalytic role between external market knowledge inflow and marketing creativity. At the same time,a high degree of uncertainty in the external environment is conducive to the increase of corporate creativity and product innovation performance. Overall,in the practice of product innovation the knowledge inflow can promote the performance of product innovation via corporate creativity. In the face of domestic and international competition,it is important to enhance product competitiveness by fostering the core competence of corporate creativity.