臺大管理論叢 NTU Management Review VOL.30 NO.3

175 NTU Management Review Vol. 30 No. 3 Dec. 2020 important information. In doing so, companies can develop their strategies of technology diversification enhance their innovation capability, and strengthen their competitiveness. Our analyses also suggest that companies should hire board members from other industries, or encourage board members to expand their external connections to experts from dissimilar industries or business groups. All these networks will help companies acquire various knowledge and key technologies, enhance corporate technological diversity, and gain competitive advantages in innovation. 5. Originality/Contribution 5.1 Originality While prior literature examines the impact of technological diversity and social networks on innovation performance separately, this study analyzes social networks, technological diversity, and innovation performance all together, and thus explores the importance of corporate directors’ social network relationships on innovation performance. To fully understand the relationships among corporate directors’ network characteristics, technological diversity, and innovation performance, and also to reveal the companies’ strategic planning of technological diversity, this study utilizes the U.S. patents filed by listed electronics companies in Taiwan (from 2010 to 2016), and classify these protected patents using the International Patent Classification (IPC). Moreover, we recognize the importance of the mediation effect in contemporary management research. Hence, this study uses Stata’s SEM and the bootstrapping method to directly infer the estimations of the mediation effect, and thus does not rely on a normal distribution assumption for the products of the mediating effect. Specifically, this study remedies the inadequacies found in prior literature and in certain research methods by fully testing whether technological diversity is the mediating factor for corporate directors’ network characteristics and innovation performance. 5.2 Contribution 5.2.1 Our empirical results do not support prior studies which stated that directors’ network density positively impacts innovation performance through the diversification of related technologies. Instead, these results indicate that in today’s highly competitive global business environment, Taiwan’s electronics industry is unable to obtain highly complex key knowledge and technology through the directors’ dense networks. To go further, network density weakens the value of technological diversity in the network.