Science Research Management ›› 2022, Vol. 43 ›› Issue (3): 46-54.

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Who drives the technology innovation of science and technology enterprises?

Zhuang Yumei1, Wang Li2   

  1. 1. School of Business Administration, Shandong University of Finance and Economics, Jinan 250014, Shandong, China;
    2. School of Accountancy, Shandong University of Finance and Economics, Jinan 250014, Shandong, China
  • Received:2021-08-19 Revised:2022-02-23 Online:2022-03-20 Published:2022-03-16

Abstract:    The international competitive environment and the bottleneck of domestic technological development urgently require scientific and technological enterprises to make high-quality technological innovation achievements. The government firmly strengths the market function of innovative resources allocation, and at the same time, has invested lots of fiscal and tax resources to support and motivate the enterprise′s technology innovation. However, both practical and theoretical fields show the positive or negative incentive results. The literatures which studied the effects of fiscal and tax incentives from the perspective of institution alone had achieved the either-or conclusions, and could not explain the different incentive results in the same context. The net affecting test of fiscal and tax resources based on linear logic could not discover the interrelations of the multiple factors and the asymmetric causality. All these prevent us from obtaining the basic driving sources of technology innovation achievements. Enterprise is an active entity embedded in diversified environment, and there are large numbers of research findings on enterprise′s technological innovation in the theoretical fields. It is necessary to explain the choice of technological innovation strategy and R&D investing behavior of the enterprise influenced by multiple environmental factors, and use the other method to explore and test the implementation routes of technology innovation achievements.The technological innovation strategy of an enterprise is the result of comprehensive consideration of a variety of internal and external environmental factors by TMT with specific purpose and cognition. The three-dimensional basic view of strategy clarifies the factors affecting enterprise strategy comprehensively from the perspectives of industrial environment, institutional incentive and enterprise resources. Therefore, the paper analyzed the innovation strategy and R&D investment behavior under the influence of the competition and technology, fiscal and tax incentives, and enterprise resources from the three-dimensional strategy framework, explored the process mechanism of effective incentives to enterprise, and then interpreted the differential driving mechanism of technology innovation achievements depending on the interactional, coupling and configurational relations of the antecedent factors dominated by TMT′s purpose and cognition. Based on the process of analysis, the paper constructed the configurational research framework between the multiple antecedent factors with correlational and synergetic relation and the innovation achievements, and used fsQCA to test.The data are mainly from 2014 to 2019 of 289 small and medium-sized board scientific and technological manufacturing enterprises. The tested results show that: (1) Industrial competition and technology, government′s fiscal and tax resources and enterprise′s R&D resources drive high-quality technological innovation in a way of differential configurations; (2) The driving paths from the resource investors includes enterprise resource dominated, government & enterprise resource collaborated and government resource dominated. This finding reflects the different degree of dependence on government resources in technology innovation process of the different enterprise. (3) Compared with tax preference, fiscal subsidies have more incentive effect on technology innovation; Compared with market competition, the value of technological innovation is more attractive to high-tech innovation, which reflects the guiding role of the market in the allocation of enterprise′s innovation resources.The theoretical significance of the paper lies in two aspects. Firstly, searching for the source of the high-tech achievements from strategy perspective rather than single institution perspective. The paper explores and analyzes the behavior of innovation and R&D investment of the enterprise influenced by the factors of institution, industry and resources, thereby it can clarify the differentiation interactional, coupling and configurational relationship among the multiple factors dominated by the TMT. Secondly, using configurational logic rather than linear logic to find out the driving routes. The paper tests the model using fsQCA and obtains the equivalent configurational solutions which drive the technology innovation achievements and the differentiation effects of specific antecedent factors in different configurations such as fiscal or tax resources, etc. Finally, the research can help explain the differentiation innovation behavior of the enterprises in the same environment and the either-or research conclusion from the institutional perspective alone. The shortage of the research is that it has not contained more antecedent factors and has not reflected the dynamic changes of configurations caused by the time.The government must follow the principle of the multiple affecting effects which environmental factors such as market and institution affecting enterprise′s innovation behavior, and the enterprise′s regular behavior pattern under its decision-making mechanism. It should examine not only the explicit indicators such as patents and innovation project, but also the implicit indicators such as strategic motivation and innovation willingness of enterprises to optimize the allocation of fiscal and tax resources. It also should choose the appropriate incentive mode according to the urgency and long-term needs to technology innovation.

Key words: market competition, industrial technology, government fiscal and tax support, enterprise R&D investment, technology innovation