Abstract: In the era of knowledge economy, innovation development is a vital strategic choice for enterprises. As an important resource for corporate innovation, social capital is playing a more and more important role during the process of corporate innovation. Taking Alibaba?Corporation as an example, this paper analyzes the social capital composition of Alibaba’s innovation development and discusses the function mechanism and the influence mechanism of social capital on Alibaba’s innovation development. It is verified that corporate innovation activities need the support of social capital; corporate social capital can effectively promote the innovation and development of enterprises through the study mechanism, the risk control mechanism, the incentive and restrictive mechanism, the cooperating mechanism, and so on.

Key words: Alibaba Corporation; social capital; innovation; mechanism