Effect of the Supplier Heterogeneity on Knowledge Transfer between the Upstream and the Downstream Partners in the Auto Manufacturing Industry

In the auto manufacturing industry, there is high level of differences among suppliers. The principal purpose of this paper is discussing the situations of knowledge transfer between different supplier and auto makers based on the analysis of supplier heterogeneity, which can offer theoretical instruction to suppliers for their knowledge acquisition strategy in the supply chain. We construct a systemic framework, in which the importance of the component supplied by a supplier and the role of him are integrated to express the characteristic of the supplier. Further, we analyze the nature and harvest of different suppliers´ knowledge transfer with auto makers, among which we emphasize the interaction effect between importance of supplier´s components and supplier role on its knowledge transfer with auto makers.