Impact of agile intuition on innovation behavior: Chinese evidence and a new proposal

Abstract

With the tendency toward economic and strategy decoupling between China and the United States and amidst the anti-globalization trend, enterprises are facing unprecedented challenges and opportunities. In this study, we reveal how the agile intuition (AI) of top managers with respect to the external environment affects enterprise innovation behavior (IB) based on the cognition-behavior framework. Strategic learning (SL) is considered a moderator, and knowledge sharing (KS) is considered a mediator. The survey sample consists of 305 managers from 47 enterprises in China during the COVID-19 period. The empirical results show that top management agile intuition significantly promotes enterprise IB; knowledge sharing (KS) partially mediates the relationship between top manager AI and enterprise IB; and SL suppresses the promotion effect of top manager AI on enterprise IB to a certain extent, hindering blind innovation. In a surprising result, we find that strategic guidance by an external consultant does not significantly affect the enterprise IB in China.