Under the background of striving to build innovative country in China, it is worth studying whether senior executives should be technical talents with more innovative consciousness and ability, whether technological senior executives are better than other else at seizing good investment opportunities given by national industrial policies and markets to improve investor returns. Research on this issue is helpful to analyze the impact of senior management team building on enterprise management efficiency and shareholder value, and to gain an insight into the micro-path to enhance China′s economic innovation and competitiveness.
    This paper focuses on two major issues, the one is the influence of technological senior executives on enterprise investment, and the other is the influence of technological senior executives on enterprise option value. According to Upper Echelons Theory (UET), technological senior executives have stronger cognitive and perceptual abilities in research and technology, and they are better at seizing investment opportunities generated by consumer demand and by the adjustment of national industrial policies. Furthermore, they can also improve the efficiency of investment. In the view of real option theory and profit-seeking nature of capital, enterprises should increase investment, expand the enterprises scale and implement growth option when facing with good investment opportunities. While facing with bad investment opportunities, enterprises should decrease investment, reduce the scale of enterprises and execute liquidation option. Technological senior executives are conducive to helping enterprises seize investment opportunities and improve investment efficiency. In other words, they can help enterprises to reinforce the law of capital profit-seeking, and then ultimately improve the value of enterprise growth option and liquidation option.
    In order to verify the above problems, this paper selects Chinese listed companies from 2011 to 2016 as samples excluding financial companies, ST companies and companies with incomplete data, and finally obtains 12,268 observations. When testing the influence of technological senior executives on option value, loss companies are deleted, the sample size is only 11,796. Technological senior executive is the key explanatory variables of this paper. Referring to previous literature, we take the following as requirements for judging technological senior executive: (1) the executive has experience in R&D and technical positions; (2) the senior executive has technical titles such as engineer and researcher; (3) the executive is a senior manager in technology or a principal in relevant technical industry association. According to the professional titles and resumes of senior executives in the sub-database of personal data provided by CSMAR, we check the standard of technical senior executives one by one, and finally confirm the definite variable number of technological senior executive. This paper establishes four models, respectively, for testing technological senior executives′ influence on enterprises investment and investment opportunities in sensitivity, the influence of technological senior executives on enterprise investment efficiency, the influence of technological senior executives on enterprise growth option value and on enterprise liquidation option value. When verifying the influence of technological senior executives on the investment efficiency of enterprises, this paper adopts the TOBIT regression method, while other tests use the OLS regression method.
    It turns out that the cross-multiplication coefficient between the investment opportunity variable and the technological senior executive variable is significantly positive, indicating that technological senior executives can be better at catching the investment opportunities and improve the sensitivity of enterprise investment expenditure to investment opportunities. The regression result of the influence of technological senior executives on the company′s investment efficiency shows that the regression coefficient of the technological senior executive variable is significantly negative. We divide the sample companies into over-investment group and under-investment group, the results show that the regression coefficient of the technological senior executive variable is still significantly negative, which indicates that technological senior executives can improve the investment efficiency of enterprises, including restraining enterprises from overinvestment and alleviating enterprises from under investment. Moreover, this paper examines the influence of technological senior executives on enterprises option value. Results show that under the premise of a given net assets, if the enterprise profit is higher, the convex relationship between enterprise value and net profit is significant in technological senior executives group only if the enterprise profit is high, but the similar convex relationship is not significant in the non-technological senior executives group, therefore suggesting that technological senior executives can promote growth options value. Under the premise of given net profit, if the enterprise profit is poor, the convex increasing relationship between enterprise value and net assets is not statistically significant in both technological senior executives group and non-technological senior executives group, indicating that technological senior executives don′t increase liquidation options value.
    This paper mainly makes contributions in three dimensions. First, it enriches the research literature on economic consequence of executives′ personal backgrounds and enriches the research result of UET. Previous literatures studied the influence of the executive team characteristics, the influences of executive age, seniority, education and other factors on business decision-making and enterprise performance, and they studied the influence of the non-core executives′ technical expertise on business decision-making. But this paper studies the influence of technological senior executives′ background on their business decisions and values. Second, it expands the research about the factors affecting enterprise option value. This paper examines and finds that the technical career background of senior executives is an important factor affecting enterprise options value, which further verifies the conclusion that corporate governance affects enterprise options value. Third, with the help of intermediate variables including investment chance and investment efficiency, along the path from technical career background to investment chance and efficiency, at last to enterprise option value, we examine the effect of technological senior executives on enterprise equity value, and construct analysis framework and research path of human capital driving enterprise equity value.
    We discover the approach of how the technological profession background of core senior executives can have influence on option value. Moreover, it will have apparent implications on establishing and structuring management team, optimizing project investment and lifting equity value under the situation of innovation-driven development.