Abstract: As management remuneration continues to increase, the public begins to question whether management capabilities match their pay. If management capability drives business performance, it is reasonable to pay high salaries; on the contrary, if the success of a company has nothing to do with the ability of the leadership, then management should not charge high rewards. In response to this view, some literatures have examined the influence of management compensation on firm performance, but less literature has analyzed the relationship between management capability and firm performance from the perspective of research and development. Therefore, from the perspective of internal control, this paper studies its role in management capability, R&D investment, and corporate performance, examines the path that internal control affects competent management to improve corporate R&D performance, and reveals obstacles to the competent management to improve corporate performance.In order to answer the questions above that need to be clarified in the process of technological innovation, this paper first constructs a mediation effect model using a step-by-step method to test whether management capabilities can improve enterprise performance through R&D investment. Subsequently, in order to study the impact of internal control quality on management capability, this paper uses an intermediary adjustment model to test how the internal control affects the relationship between management capability and R&D performance.The results show that: first of all, the competent management improves corporate performance by increasing the investment in research and development, which indicates that the competent management is more able to lower financing cost and obtain more sufficient funds for innovation, so as to improve the corporate performance. At the same time, competent management is more trusted by stakeholders, so it has more say in increasing R&D investment in the company, which is beneficial to improving corporate performance. Even if companies with poor financing constraints and great uncertainty hire competent management, they will be given more say. In such companies, the competent management desire to change the financial difficulties as soon as possible, and a feasible solution is to innovate successfully and occupy the market. Therefore, they will carry out R&D innovation and try to make the enterprise achieve innovation success.Secondly, in the high-quality internal control group, even if a certain amount of research and development capital is invested, it may not be able to innovate successfully and affect the performance of the enterprise. This may be account for that high-quality internal control has stricter controls on employees, which limits their ability and initiative to innovate. In the low-quality internal control group, R&D investment is the mediating variable between the management capability and corporate performance, that is to say, the competent management of the low-quality internal control companies is capable and willing to improve business performance directly. The results of the comparison between the two groups present that, compared with the high-quality internal control, the competence of management in the low-quality internal control group improves the R&D performance of the enterprise, supporting the Hypothesis 2b. In other words, the hypothesis of "limitation of management capacity" is established, which indicates that high-quality internal control is relatively so stringent that competent management tend to waver when investing in research and development due to complicated restraints, reducing the possibility of innovation success and innovation performance.Finally, the path to explain how internal control inhibits management capability and R&D performance is that internal control restraints the ability of leadership to increase the enterprise investments in research and development. It can be seen that, with the audit committee′s review process and the approval process of R&D investment becoming increasingly strict, capability managers are afraid that their career interest will be damaged by R&D innovation failure, so they will consider to reduce the investment of some R&D projects with low success rate.In view of the above conclusions, this article puts forward the following suggestions: first, select, recruit and motivate more competent managers to be responsible for the management of R&D projects. That is to say, during the critical stage of innovation, enterprises need to give more discourse power to the competent management who are in charge of innovation project. Consequently, they can give full play to their management ability, so as to promote the improvement of innovation performance. In addition, enterprises should stimulate the innovation enthusiasm of the competent management through the incentive contract system. In order to improve the research and development performance of enterprises, the firms should adopt stock option and other long-term incentive systems, or set up R&D success award and R&D performance rewards in the remuneration, so as to motivate the competent management to make better use of their professional ability and improve the R&D performance of the company.Second, a flexible internal control system should be set up to empower competent management with a certain right to invest in research and development activities. In other words, in the tackling phase of corporate innovation, enterprises can set up a flexible audit committee working system to give competent management more power to invest in R&D projects, so that they can make judgment on investment in research and development based on their professional competence.Moreover, enterprises can set up a green approval channel. For some crucial and urgent R&D projects, the competent management can put forward temporary proposals and report directly to the chairman of the board, which can be approved by the chairman and then implemented, so as to speed up the approval process and help the competent management improve the R&D performance of the company.

Key words: managerial ability, R&D spending, R&D performance, internal control