Abstract: In technology-intensive industries firms are often involved in setting two types of technical standards, namely incremental and novel technical standards, which have different strategic attributes and both profoundly affect the development of industrial innovation. Using a panel data of 1,987 companies in the Chinese automotive industry from 1988 to 2010, this paper studies the impact of external collaborative R&D network locations and internal technological capabilities on a firm’s performance in setting incremental and novel technical standards. The empirical results based on zero-inflated negative binomial models show that a firm’s closeness centrality in the collaborative R&D network is conducive to increasing the number of novel technical standards set by the firm, but has no significant effect on its performance in setting incremental technical standards. Internal technological capabilities are helpful for a firm to become a setter of incremental and novel technical standards, but not conductive for it to setting more novel technical standards. When a firm sets novel technical standards, internal technological capabilities negatively moderate its closeness centrality in the collaborative R&D network. Therefore, closeness centrality in collaborative R&D network and internal technological capabilities have contingent effects on firms’ performance in setting the two types of technical standards.

Key words: incremental technical standards, novel technical standards, collaborative R&D network, internal technological capabilities, contingent effect