Abstract:

  Innovation has become a fundamental driving force for enterprise development and regional economic transformation and upgrading, and venture capital is an important supporting factor for promoting innovation. Sharing similar properties, both venture capital and innovation are high-level economic activities that combine high risk and high returns. Different from ordinary producer services, venture capital also concerns the business content of “underlying” enterprises in terms of financial communication, industrial technology, strategic consulting and enterprise management. It is often involved in the innovation and production process of the company because of a keen sense of the market prospects for corporate innovation. Therefore, venture capital and innovation may be synchronic in the time dimension.
In the era of knowledge economy, innovation is becoming more open and inclusive. Because of the increasing intensity of knowledge information interaction and spillover between different innovation subjects, innovation activities often exhibit characteristics of spatial agglomeration. The co-location represents the spatial and temporal interaction between venture capital and innovation. At present, innovation has become the core driving force for China’s economic transformation and upgrading. The Chinese venture capital industry started late but developed quite rapidly. Understanding the relationship and mechanism of venture capital and innovation correctly helps to provide useful guidance for relevant practices, and it is of great significance to promote effective combination and benign interaction between the two.
 Based on reviewing the relevant literature, this paper proposed a theoretical framework on how venture capital interacts with innovation through two types of effects. The ‘treatment effect’ is the effect of venture capital on innovation. It includes two kinds of influence paths. One is through the financial mechanism related to capital, and the other is through the value-added services that are not necessarily related to capital. The “selection effect” refers to the effect of innovation on venture capital. Innovation reveals explicitly the investment value of innovative enterprises and hence is the signal released by enterprises to attract venture capital. The professionals at venture capital institutions constantly search for and decode such signals, thus effectively alleviating the problem of information asymmetry in venture capital market. A set of five hypotheses are proposed to test empirically these possible interactive effects between venture capital and innovation. Enterprise innovation capacity is measured using the number of patent authorization and acceptance. Both the amount and event of venture capital investment are used to measure the magnitude and frequency of venture capital investment activity. A 1995- 2014 panel data set is established to test the relationship between venture capital and innovation at the provincial level using panel data model. 
  The results show that the correlation between the amount of venture capital and R&D expenditure is not significant, implying that venture capital does not directly affect innovation through capital investment in R&D activities. The effect of venture capital on innovative enterprises is mainly through non-R&D activities. A further test indicates enterprises that obtain venture capital would inhibit innovation. Because venture capital focuses on non-R&D activities, it pays more attention to how to cash in timely the existing innovative achievements, which bring about the pressure onto innovative enterprises and make them to prioritize the return on capital, capital withdrawal and IPO listing. However, the number of venture capital investment cases has a positive impact on innovation, implying that venture capital promotes innovation by providing value-added services to enterprises. The occurrence of each venture capital investment event is a process of knowledge spillover and information sharing between the investor and the invested party, which may help to improve the knowledge, technology and management level of innovative enterprise. Therefore, there were two kinds of reverse action paths in the process of venture capital influencing firm innovation. The focus of previous research was mainly to verify the effect of venture capital on innovation through different samples. However, this paper does not simply draw a simple conclusion on whether venture capital promotes innovation. Based on theoretical reasoning and empirical evidence, the findings of the paper show that the effect of venture capital on innovation, which can be promotion, suppression or neutrality, depends on the net effect of two types of interaction, illustrating the reason of the existing contradictory conclusions in the literature. In addition, the authorized patents, truly representing the level of enterprise innovation, has a significant positive impact on the number of venture capital cases, but it is not significantly associated with the amount of venture capital investment. The result confirms the theoretical hypotheses constructed in this paper.
  In short, this paper explores the spatio-temporal synergic relationship between venture capital investment and innovation in China during the period of 1995-2014 and investigates the intrinsic mechanism of the interaction between them using panel regression model. The research results show that venture capital has “functional effect” on innovation. There are two types of functional paths, which are achieved through the financing function and value-added service function of venture capital, respectively. However, venture capital excludes itself from R&D activities of innovative enterprises and the profitability seeking behavior of venture capital can also suppress firm innovation. While value-added services by venture capital can effectively promote innovation, the ultimate net impact of "functional effect" depends on the strengths and weaknesses of these two paths. Innovation has a "selection effect" on venture capital, indicating that innovation is an effective screening signal for venture capital to enter. It can attract venture capital investment to occur. However, it has no direct relationship with the amount of venture capital investment.
   This paper makes several important contributions to the literature. Theoretically, the research framework and path analysis proposed in this paper help to strengthen understanding the interaction between venture capital and innovation, which provides a theoretical basis and an analytical perspective for future research. In terms of methodology, by distinguishing the number of venture capital cases and the amount of venture capital investment, and differentiating between patent acceptance and patent authorization, the empirical models effectively reveal the different roles and impacts in the interaction between venture capital and innovation. Practically, the conclusions of this research have important policy implications for regional and corporate development. At the macro scale, local governments should actively promote regional innovation capabilities that then attract venture capital and promote the development of local venture capital. At the same time, it needs to avoid the single use of the amount of venture capital to evaluate the effectiveness of venture capital. Rather, more attention needs to be paid to the innovation cultivation and incubation functions that are often hidden behind venture capital so that a positive interaction between venture capital and innovation can be established. In addition, it is necessary to restrain the "floating mood" of venture capital to a certain extent. Venture capital should be encouraged to participate more in R&D activities and play to its comprehensive role in promoting innovation. At the micro level, companies should pay attention to enhancing their ability to innovate. In cooperation with venture capital institutions, we should not only focus on the scale of financing of investors, but also pay attention to their industry experience and specialization, and whether they can provide useful value-added services.

Key words: venture capital, innovation, interaction, spatial-temporal relationship, influence path