Enterprise Social Network and Innovation Performance: Unpacking the Black Box of Knowledge Management Capability as Mediators

Against the backdrop of Supply Chain 4.0, social networks play an increasingly critical role in enterprises’ knowledge management and innovation. However, existing studies have not thoroughly explored how social networks affect knowledge management and innovation performance, nor clarified the differentiated roles of internal and external social networks in knowledge transmission. This research gap, combined with enterprises’ practical demand for improving innovation efficiency and reducing knowledge management costs, forms the core basis of this study. To fill these gaps, this study focuses on the relationship between social network, knowledge management, and innovation performance, with three specific objectives: (1) explore how internal and external social networks affect enterprise innovation performance through knowledge management; (2) clarify the differentiated mediating roles of various knowledge management capabilities in this relationship; (3) explore the moderating role of strategic orientation in this process. Based on a sample of 324 Chinese technology manufacturing enterprises, this study uses structural equation modeling and bootstrap methods to empirically test the research hypotheses. The results indicate that internal social networks enhance innovation performance through the mediating role of knowledge inventive, transformative, and innovative capability. External social network exerts a positive influence on innovation performance via the mediating mechanism of knowledge absorptive, connective, and desorptive capability. Furthermore, entrepreneurial orientation moderates the relationship between knowledge innovative capability and innovation performance, while market orientation plays a moderating role in the link between knowledge desorptive capability and innovation performance. This study’s primary academic contribution lies in unpacking the “black box” of knowledge management capability and delineating its multifaceted role in driving innovation performance, thereby offering a novel perspective on the underlying mechanism through which enterprise social networks influence innovation performance.