Abstract: Enterprises’ planning and governance over their innovation network position could improve their inbound open innovation practice effectively. Meantime, technology grouping generated with the developing evolution of industrial technology have become a vital environmental character for enterprises to consider in planning and governing innovation network. Therefore, to discuss the relationship between innovation network position and inbound open innovation practice considering the moderating effect of technology grouping has great importance for both research and practice. This paper chooses Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality, 3D print, Hybrid electric vehicle and Unmanned aerial vehicle as research object and introduces industrial technology concentration ratio as a criterion to divide the development of industrial technology to explore the impact of innovation network position and technology grouping on inbound open innovation by conducting patent citation network analysis and hierarchical regression analysis with patent data of main enterprises in these four emerging industries during 1997~2017. The findings are as follows. The industry technology develops in such three distinct stages as initial stage, growing stage and stable stage, which are all accompanied by technology grouping. The centrality and connectivity of enterprises in innovation network positively affect their inbound open innovation; Technology grouping has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between network position and inbound open innovation. This paper points out that entering into an actively interactive technology grouping by initiative and prospective technology forecast, development and application is beneficial for enterprises to practise inbound open innovation.

Key words: innovation network position, inbound open innovation, technology grouping, industrial technology concentration ratio