Science Research Management

An analysis of the current situation and trend of the industrial innovation ecosystem abroad

Huang Lucheng1,2, Mi Lan1, Wu Feifei2

2019, 40(5): 1-12.

Abstract ( 472 )

The notion of ‘innovation ecosystem’ is an emerging concept and has become popular in the industrial/sectoral economic development context. This paper reviews the literature on industrial innovation ecosystems (IIE) from 1993 to 2018 for discerning the new scientific truths and state-of-the-art in this area. Using the topic retrieval method, the data set covers 513 articles obtained from the Web of Science Core Collection (SCI-EXPANDED, SSCI, CPCI-S, CPCI-SSH, BKCI-S, BKCI-SSH, CCR-EXPANDED, IC). Descriptive statistics are used to describe the basic features of the literature. Then, text mining methods including cluster analysis and semantic mining are combined to identify and analyze the research status and evolution mode of some international IIE. Moreover, this article may shed some lights for future research about industrial innovation ecosystem. The research findings may contribute to the theoretical development in the context of IIE as follows:Firstly, the development process of the industrial innovation ecosystem is investigated through a historical retrospect on the origin and development of IIE. Started from the innovation system (IS), the national innovation system (NIS) and the regional innovation system (RIS), the academic realm combines the concepts of 'innovation system' and 'ecosystem’ to push the term 'innovation ecosystem'. Then, the 'industrial innovation ecosystem' is proposed and studied in an industry context. Thus, the literature on discussions of Industrial Innovation Ecosystem has increased significantly in the past five years.Secondly, by means of the quantitative methods, such asbibliometrics, visualized knowledge graph, and comprehensive evaluation of entropy weight, the influence of the countries and journals is analyzed in IIE field. The countries’ influence in the IIE research has been available in a prioritized area worldwide including the USA, England, France, Australia, Belgium in descending order. When compared with journals’ share and impact, the influence appeared to be substantial in six journals, such as Strategic Management Journal, Research Policy, MIS Quarterly, Harvard Business Review, Ecological Economics in descending order. Thirdly, reviewing the identified research topics through the analysis of LDA topic model, six core influence research themes are extracted in IIE field. Theme 1 focuses on industrial platforms, technology platforms, tools platforms and related strategic management research in industrial innovation ecosystems. Theme 2 refers to the respective of resources and environmental factors of ecosystems such as knowledge, technologies, products, services, soft-circumstance conditions and so on. Theme 3 focuses on the relationships among the innovators in the industrial innovation ecosystem and on the different research scenarios along with the process of interaction among the innovators. The main research scenarios include bilateral relations, the industrial background, and the whole industrial ecosystem. Theme 4 concentrates on the characteristics and patterns of the industrial innovation ecosystem, such as the mechanisms, co-evolutionary development and so on. Theme 5 mainly concerns the methods, models and theoretical frameworks of the industrial innovation ecosystem, which aim to provide the fundaments toward the biology-inspired theoretical construction and advancement. Theme 6 focuses on the related infrastructure upon public policies and service, the institutional framework and tools of policy in the industrial innovation ecosystem.Fourthly, for future studies, six research trends of industrial innovation ecosystem are elaborated as follows: (1) The industrial innovation ecosystem based on platform and digital technology needs to be further examined. (2) The research of industrial innovation ecosystem might consider the integrated empirical verification method. (3) On account of the increasing interdependence and technology fusion among communities and the blurring of industrial boundaries, it is needed to redefine related concepts in the developing field of IIE. (4) Under the specific industry boundary conditions, the principles of decision-making and behavioral chains in industrial innovation ecosystem need to be further studied. (5) Government intervention and its policies for the industrial innovation ecosystem. (6) Investigations on the development models of the industry innovation ecosystem in the multi-industry scenarios.Fifthly, the nature of research methods in IIE field are reviewed, and it indicates that: the specific ‘appreciative’ methods have declined significantly, the ‘formal’ methods have a dramatic growth; the usage of combination of appreciative and empirical methods or the combination of formal and empirical methods have increased obviously, and these two combination types have gradually evolved into the pivot of methods in the IIE research.Although much progress has been made in the IIE field, there are still some issues that need to be underlined and figured out. Existing studies have fully explored the overall characteristics of the industrial innovation ecosystem. However, few studies have brought together the specific industrial innovation ecosystem and its various components, especially deep into the specific industrial innovation system with the clarified particularity of the industry. It is needed to strengthen the examination on industrial innovation ecosystem under different national and social background. For example, the aging of populations has a rapid development in the worldwide and is one of the highest achievements of humankind. The changes in population structure have had a profound impact on the demand of product and service innovations and have formed an important challenge on the development of socio-technical transition. The existing research has not yet introduced the changing population structure (degree of age-related aspect) into the industrial innovation ecosystem, and further study its influential mechanism. The ecological theory method has the nature and characteristics of the general methodology. However, further research is needed for bridging the emerging research area of the industrial innovation ecosystem. There is a big gap to lead to new scientific truths of the industrial innovation ecosystem, such as how to apply the concepts of diversity, stability, resilience, and health and the evaluation methods of the ecology into the context industry innovation ecosystem. Moreover, most of the current research on IIE is based on scientific literature, patents, statistical data, and survey data. Although these data play an important role to discover the development trend and evolving nature of industry and technology, they have the drawback on the time lag. It is prominent to consider how to integrate with stronger and opportune network information into the research of industrial innovation ecosystem.

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A research on evolution of China’s big data policy system

Liu Yaya, Qu Wan, Feng Haihong

2019, 40(5): 13-23.

Abstract ( 331 )

The era of digital economy has arrived. Big data has become a new driving force for economic transformation and development, and it is also the key to promoting high-quality economic and social development. In the context of global integration and rapid digital development, the ability of a country to master and use big data will become an important manifestation of national competitiveness. Big data development has been put on the global agenda. The major countries in the world have successively released big data strategies. Organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the World Economic Forum etc. have also released reports to actively explore the relationship between big data and economic and social development. Therefore, it is becoming more and more urgent to develop a scientific and reasonable big data policy system to support the high-quality development of big data. The relevant research on big data policy in the academic world mainly focuses on the comparative research on the spatial dimension, lacking of systematic analysis on big data policy of its evolution, policy networks, the evolution of policy thematic word, and the use of policy instruments.Based on this, this paper will start from the two dimensions of policy instrument and policy thematic word, make a textual quantitative analysis of those policies from four aspects by constructing " Policy Instrument -- Policy Thematic Word " two-dimensional analytical framework. The four aspects are as follows: the evolution of China's big data policies, policy networks of big data policies, the evolution of policy thematic words, and the use of policy instruments. The big data policy texts selected in this paper are all from public data sources, mainly collected from the websites of the Chinese government and the ministries and commissions. In order to reflect the status quo of China's big data policy more comprehensively, the original policy texts are obtained by searching for keywords such as “big data”, “artificial intelligence”, “informatization” and “cloud computing” and so on. On that basis, a total of 94 policy texts related to big data were selected as the analysis objects. This paper regards 2000 as the start of China's big data policy research. The reason is that the bursting of the tech and telecom bubble in 2000, which threatened to pull the economy into recession. In order to help the software and the integrated circuit industries, the State Planning Commission (now renamed the National Development and Reform Commission) and other 13 ministries and commissions jointly issued a policy < Several Policies for Encouraging the Development of Software Industry and Integrated Circuit Industry>, to support the development of the software industry and integrated circuit industry. It is a crucial time for the rapid development of the information industry.The research results show that the development of big data policy in China has experienced a development process from emphasizing infrastructure construction to focus on industrial cultivation and innovation, and then to build a big data policy system. In the first stage of thedevelopment process of the big data policy system, the government mainly focuses on the infrastructure construction related to big data. In the second stage, the government focuses on promoting the research and development and demonstration and application projects of the Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, Big Data, the Chinese government is also putting an intensive focus on strategic emerging industries. The third stage of the development process is the construction stage of China's big data policy system. The Chinese government takes the development of the big data as its national strategy to promote the development of big data. At different stages of the development process of big data policy, policy themes are closely related to the economic, social and international environment at that time. In the early stage, China's big data policy theme focuses on the construction of infrastructure, in order to help the software and the integrated circuit industries, the Chinese government issued special policies, developing the information industry in an effort to accelerate nationalinformatization processes. Since 2010, the Chinese government stressed the importance for the country to accelerate the cultivation and development of strategic emerging industries, " cloud computing " and " strategic emerging industries " are representative policy thematic words. In recent years, China's big data policy thematic words focus on big data technology and application, such as "Internet +" "Artificial Intelligence" "cloud platform” etc. Based on existing research results,and in combination with the connotation and development characteristics of big data, this paper classifies policy instruments into ten types. They are talent policy, market-access policy, fiscal policy, tax policy, financial policy, government procurement, international development, intellectual property protection, infrastructure construction, and innovative service platform. Through the statistical analysis we found that the most used is market-access policy instrument (25.00%)，followed by the infrastructure construction (22.18%). The financial policy instrument (9.51%) and fiscal policy instrument (9.15%) are also used more, and this shows that the development of China's big data as a whole is still in the initial stage of the development process, the state attaches great importance to the construction of infrastructure and platforms, is accompanied by the capital investment in the development of big data. However, intellectual property protection (3.70%) and government procurement policy instrument (2.11%) are used less frequently than other policy instruments. International development (6.51%) is used more frequently. Under the guidance of the principles of innovative, coordinated, green, open, and shared development, we should endeavor to bolster international exchanges and cooperation. At present, China has initially established a big data policy network system, which has formed a pattern of coexistence of large and small networks. The development and application of big data are changing with each passing day. China's big data is still in the initial stage of the development process. The big data policy system with perfect system and organic synergy has not yet been established. The top-level design of big data policy is still not perfect, and we still need to further improve and strengthen it.

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A study of industrial chain upgrading from a perspective of firm growth and innovation

2019, 40(5): 24-35.

Abstract ( 255 )

For some emerging market firms (EMF), industrial chain upgrading is one of the most important way of breaking away from the “low-end locking” by multinational enterprises in the world. Many strategies are adopted by EMFs in order to create and maintain their competitive positions in the world markets. The competition pressure drives EMFs to find other trajectories to survive their markets. The fact is that single firm hardly survives and develops when facing such challenge. Under such circumstance, the growth of those firms is linked closely to the process of industrial chain upgrading. Meanwhile, most of them adopted innovation as one effective strategy to compete with other firms. Therefore, understanding the innovative activities of firms in different growth stages in the process of industrial chain upgrading draws attentions of many scholars, especially those emerging-centered ones. Industrial chains create several competitive advantages for EMFs in market competition. Meanwhile, firm innovation activities enhance the upgrading process of industrial chains. First, innovative inputs of firm could be better utilized with the help of knowledge spillovers both within and across industrial chains. Within the same industrial chain, firms transfer their knowledge more smoothly, and knowledge spillovers benefit them through the activities of sharing and learning. At the same time, they also could easily find and establish their collaboration relationships by participating into some industrial chains. So, those firms could share their experiences more effectively with the help of a network structure of industrial chains. As a result, they could largely avoid the outside uncertainty and risks. Furthermore, the absorptive capabilities of firms make firms ‘digest’ knowledge outside the boundaries of them. Some industrial chains even create an infrastructure to facilitate such fresh knowledge. The absorptive capabilities also make firms more competitive through, for instance, the secondary innovation. Therefore, discussing the underling mechanism of factors including innovative inputs, firm absorptive capabilities in the context of industrial chains becomes an important research question. Besides, the upgrading of industrial chains depends mainly on the growth of firms within them. Firm innovation activities are more influenced by entrepreneurship of newly founded firms. Traditionally, a start-up grows in chains and becomes an adolescent firm. The different stages of a firm growth draw the attentions of many scholars. Both start-ups and adolescent firms are a member of collaborators or competitors in industrial chains. They play a big role in determining the upgrading of industrial chains. Therefore, the process of firm growth should be fully considered when we are trying to understand the upgrading of industrial chains in the emerging markets.In the purpose of solving the above questions, this paper incorporates a firsthand data set of firms in the emerging markets of China and employs a method of ordinal regression to examine the theoretical hypotheses constructed by it. On the basis of firm growth and innovation theories, it explores the degree of embedding industrial chain in the different stages of firm growth. In the field of actual business, a single firm hardly survives itself in today’s market competition. However, industrial chains create a context through which the single firm could find others so that they could collaborate together in innovation. Then, embedding into industrial chains becomes determinant for firms who adopt collaborative innovation.The findings provide strong evidences supporting our hypotheses. First, as to the relationship between firm innovative inputs and embedding degree, it is still a question without accurate answers. We then begin our study with a competing hypothesis (H1). The empirical results demonstrate there is a negative relationship between firm innovative inputs and the embedding degree in industrial chains. Second, the absorptive capabilities of firms affect the embedding degree to industrial chains in the process of firm innovation. A firm with better absorptive capabilities could transfer outside knowledge more efficient and utilize them into building their own competitive capabilities. The competitiveness further helps them to embed industrial chains more effectively. Therefore, there is a positive relationship between the absorptive capabilities and the embedding degree, which is supported by our empirical findings (H2). Third, we analyze effects of innovative inputs and absorptive capabilities in different stages of the firm growth. We find that start-ups are more difficult to embed into industrial chains. One of the possible explanations might be that start-ups generally face some market barriers like the scarcity of resources. Meanwhile, some start-ups are short of business experiences making them rather difficult to collaborate with other firms. Our empirical findings provide evidences at this point (H3a). Furthermore, being a start-up negatively moderates the above relationship. That is to say, the negative relationship between firm innovative inputs and the embedding degree is strengthened by the attribute of being a start-up (H3b). Such effects could also be indicated by the role of start-ups on the positive relationship between the absorptive capabilities and embedding degree. As shown by our empirical evidences, their positive association is weakened by a start-up (H3c). Forth, with the same logic of the effect of start-ups, we examine the effects of adolescent firms. In comparison with a start-up an adolescent firm is more likely to embed industrial chains, which is strongly supported by our results (H4a). In a further step, we hypothesized that being an adolescent firm positively moderates the relationship between its innovative inputs and embedding degree (H4b). However, the hypothesis is not supported. But it shows that being an adolescent firm positively moderates the relationship between firm absorptive capabilities and embedding degree. In other words, the positive relationship between the absorptive capabilities and embedding degree is strengthened by an adolescent firm (H4c). As shown by our empirical results, most of our hypotheses are supported.This paper has theoretical significance and bears profound practical implications. Although firm innovation and networking (here refers to industrial chain networks) are accepted as the most powerful way of competing in world markets for EMFs, rare studies have provided any explanations as to the joint effects of them. We synthesize them in applying them into the context of industrial chains. By doing so, we expand boundaries of firm innovation and industrial upgrading by providing a theoretical lens of firm growth. The stages of start-up and adolescence are examined with the interplay of firm growth and industrial upgrading. Some factors determining firm innovation activities are involved in the above theoretical context, including innovative inputs, absorptive capabilities. Practically, our study casts a light on firm innovation and expansion in emerging markets. Research findings show that the more firms’ innovation inputs the lower embedding degree and the higher absorptive capacities the higher embedding degree in the start-up period. Meanwhile, compared to the adolescence period, firms in the period of start-ups have a lower level of embedding degree. So we argue that it’s better for practical firms to spend more efforts into strengthening absorptive capabilities rather than inputting resources when they are just beginning their business. Furthermore, the relationship between innovation inputs and embedding degree is negatively moderated by the start-up period. And the relationship between absorptive capacities and embedding degree is negatively moderated by the start-up period, while positively moderated by the adolescence period. The practical implication might be that firm should notice those differences when it selects embedding an industrial chain. For instance, a flexible embedding strategy in different growth phrases might be a rational choice. Precisely, in earlier stage, the absorptive capabilities are more important than innovation inputs. And in the later stage, collaborative activities should be more addressed by innovative firms.Even though, our study has some limitations. First, our sample is constructed based on some High-Tech firms in the emerging markets of China. Although it gives us some convenience to examine the research question, but it also has shortcomings the most of first hand data sources could not avoid. For example, it is more subjective in terms of the answers provided by the questionnaires. Second, we discuss the different roles taken by start-ups and adolescent firms in upgrading processes of industrial chains. However, some latent factors, like geographical elements, influencing firm growth and innovation activities might be neglected in this study. To some extent, this makes our conclusions might not be universally applied. Of course, investigating this question might beyond the scope of our study. However, it does create space for future research.

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A research on product innovation mechanism of Chinese Internet enterprises from the perspective of innovation value chain——A nested multi-case analysis based on Tencent 1998-2016

Liu Jing，Fan Jingming

2019, 40(5): 35-46.

Abstract ( 542 )

The Internet industry has increasingly become an important engine for stimulating the development of the global economy. The rapid development of Chinese Internet companies has attracted widespread attention. Throughout the history of the development of Chinese Internet companies, almost every Internet company has a long-term follow-up development of the US "Silicon Valley Model". And almost all successful companies have found out in the process of growth that is completely different from the original survival and business model. Although the disputes of “plagiarism and innovation” faced by Chinese Internet companies in the product development process are still continuing, the Internet companies represented by Tencent, the research object of this paper, are growing into world-class enterprises. How to explain the above-mentioned "paradox" development of Chinese Internet companies? What is the product innovation mechanism of Chinese Internet companies? What are the development characteristics of China? These are the core issues guiding the development of Chinese Internet companies. However, to date, the theoretical and practical circles have not yet given a clear answer to these questions.This paper intends to use the "innovative value chain" as the theoretical basis to select one of China's fastest growing Internet integrated service providers -Tencent Holdings Co., Ltd. (“Tencent”), which is headquartered in Shenzhen, as its research object. Since the diachronic development of product development, the company has selected the product innovation event with historical turning point as the analysis unit, and the three stages of the innovation value chain as the analysis framework. What are the core constructs of each stage analysis and different constructs? The key elements of “why” and “how” change the main line to develop cross-unit case analysis to reveal the internal mechanism of China's Internet enterprise innovation value chain.This paper takes the innovation value chain theory as the analysis framework, based on the analytical framework of “creative creation-creative transformation-creative communication” proposed by Hansen and Birkinshaw (2007) and conducts nested multi-case analysis of Tencent's product innovation events from 1998 to 2016, and tries to explore the innovation mechanism of Chinese Internet companies. The research finds that: First, the creative production stage focuses on the analysis of creative architecture elements from a creative perspective. The static perspective analysis shows that the creative categories include both transplanted and derived creatives. Dynamic perspective analysis leads to creative reorganization through dynamic combination and gradient advanced approach. The evolution process is finally completed with breakthrough ideas. Secondly, the creative transformation stage focuses on analyzing the development model elements from an organizational perspective. The static perspective analysis leads to the organizational level of the product manager system and the project-level small team development model. The dynamic perspective analysis leads to the enterprise-level horse racing mechanism and project level. The micro-cycle model enables agile management to improve innovation performance. Thirdly, the creative communication stage focuses on analyzing the elements of the interaction mechanism from the perspective of users. The static perspective analysis leads to the emotional demand mining based on Chinese-style understanding to lock the emotional communication element. The dynamic perspective analysis leads to the advanced mode driven by user experience and continuous optimization. The evolution of services, with a platform-based product feedback system to quickly find new product development appeals.The theoretical contributions of this paper are as follows: (1) By deconstructing the three-stage model of “innovative value chain”, this paper extracts the key elements of the three-stage interdependence in the process of product innovation in Chinese Internet enterprises, and deeply analyzes the phased changes of each element, making The evolutionary characteristics of the innovation value chain are specifically revealed. It provides a preliminary integrated theoretical analysis framework for the dynamic research of innovative value chain theory. (2) This paper argues that in the different stages of the development of Internet enterprises, the characteristics of the three stages of the innovation value chain and the impact on the innovation performance are different. Therefore, when observing the product innovation behavior of the enterprise through the perspective of the innovation value chain, it is necessary. A more comprehensive understanding of the stage of development and the characteristics of the previous innovation value chain will enable a more accurate understanding. This conclusion makes up for the existing research that overemphasizes the development of the three-stage equilibrium advantage of the innovation value chain. (3) Some studies have pointed out that late-developing countries can catch up with and surpass technology through integrated innovation, and affirm that integrated innovation is an effective path for product innovation in late-developing countries, while few studies have developed innovative ideas for Chinese Internet enterprise products from the perspective of integrated innovation. The source is analyzed for this phenomenon.Looking at the development process of Chinese Internet companies from the perspective of dynamic development, there are also some characteristics of integrated innovation in the stage of creative generation: firstly, not simple imitation, but re-integration of transplant ideas; Secondly, in the process of creative integration Carry out secondary innovation and achieve breakthrough innovation. Due to the rapid development of the industry characteristics of the Internet industry, it is an inevitable choice to quickly transplant product innovations that have been tested by the market in the process of catching up with the development of the company, and it is also an inevitable choice for Ma Huateng’s “disputed first” product innovation logic.

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A research on the business model innovation through embedding corporate social responsibility

Wang Xuedong, Kuang Haibo, Dong Dahai

2019, 40(5): 47-56.

Abstract ( 392 )

For a long time, managing the relationship between business and society has been one of the main topics of business literature. How to realize sustainable business model innovation has always been a dual challenge in both theoretical and practical fields, embedding corporate social responsibility (CSR) into business model innovation is considered to be a feasible way. However, such issues about "how is CSR embedded and how does it affect business model innovation?" still remain poorly understood in current studies. The purpose of this paper is to understand “how CSR is embedded in business model innovation and also its impact on business model innovation"In order to answer the above questions, this paper uses an exploratory single case study method to conduct research. The questions discussed in this paper address new issue that has not been fully solved by the existing research. They focus on the theoretical hypothesis and are suitable for the exploratory case study. At the same time, the single case study can help us better understand the background of the case and ensure the depth of the case study. Based on the reasons such as case representativeness, compatibility and data availability, this paper chooses the cultural and tourism business of Wanda group as the case study object, collects data through multiple methods, including semi-structured interviews, second-hand materials, field research etc., and conducts a longitudinal analysis of the development process of cultural and tourism business in Wanda group according time sequence. Through in-depth case analysis of the longitudinal development of the cultural and tourism business in Wanda Group, this paper reveals the mechanism of the process to embed CSR into the business model innovation.The findings of the research suggest three main conclusions. Firstly, the CSR embeddedness is the process from marginal to core issues, and from traditional charity to the creating shared value concept. The cultural and tourism city business in Wanda Group has experienced three development stages: the profit-maximization oriented cultural and tourism industrial complex, the cultural and tourism city with budding of CSR, and the red tourism town with CSR embedded. In the early stage of cultural and tourism industrial complex, profit maximization occupied the leading position, and there was basically no clear CSR action and awareness within Wanda Group. The commercial success has promoted the awakening of CSR awareness in Wanda Group, but CSR is still a marginal issue in this stage and has not become the main tone affecting business model innovation of Wanda Group. However, in the stage of red tourism town, CSR has become the soul of cultural and tourism business model in Wanda Group. CSR has been placed at the core of the business model of "red tourism town" and is the key driving force of business model remodeling in Wanda Group. In the evolution of Wanda cultural and tourism business model, CSR has gradually changed from a marginal issue to a core issue of the business model, and its business model has completed the transformation from profit maximization to value creation. Wanda Group has embedded the concept of "creatingshared value" into its business model innovation activities, and reconstructed its business model through red tourism town. While solving social problems that intersect with its cultural and tourism businesses and creating social value, it has also created the economic value of the enterprise. Secondly, this paper reveals the complicated mechanism between CSR embeddedness, corporate survival crisis and business model innovation. At the beginning, business model innovation is not necessarily need CSR get involved, Wanda Group started the business model innovation of cultural and tourism industry complex under the guidance of profit maximization. Although business model innovation does not necessarily require the stimulation of CSR, but successful business model innovation can stimulate the bud of CSR and provide necessary premise for the CSR embeddedness. Business model innovation will arouse the awareness of CSR and provide necessary preconditions for the embedding of CSR. However, although business model innovation will lead to the awakening of CSR consciousness, it will not form the embedding of CSR. The crisis of corporate survival is the trigger for the embedding of CSR. The awareness of CSR cannot ensure the continuous business success. The continuous excessive pursuit of profit maximization will inevitably lead to the loss of control of the business model and the formation of the enterprise survival crisis within the enterprise. Corporate survival crisis will lead to the business model smash, but corporate survival crisis, as a kind of strong stimulation, also eliminated the poor stimulus, will free the organization from the current assumptions and judgments. Corporate survival crisis is the trigger of embedding CSR into business model innovation, and make the CSR concept transfer from the "traditional CSR " to "creating Shared value", eventually form the CSRembeddings. Finally, this paper answers the impacts of embedding CSR into business model innovation. CSR embeddedness improves the robustness of business model. For the value proposition, CSR embeddedness helps to form a more robust growth space. After the embeddedness of CSR, the differentiated value proposition represented by red culture and intangible cultural heritage constitutes the soul of the new business model of red culture and tourism town, and morally opens up the growth space for Wanda Group. For the operation model, the embeddedness of CSR helps to form a broader community of interests. After the embeddedness of CSR, Wanda Group developed Wanda red cultural tourism projects through cooperation and joint venture, through the combination of public welfare and business, the company operates better, make more profits and gain higher reputation in the market in a relatively restrained and restrained way. In terms of the profit model, the embeddedness of CSR will help return to reasonable business profit. After the embeddedness of CSR, the cultural and tourism business of Wanda Group is no longer pursuit of vast profits in real estate simple and crude, but return to the reasonable profit of cultural and tourism industry. In short, embedding CSR is the important way to rebuild business model under the corporate survival crisis.The paper focuses on "how is CSR embedded and how does it affect business model innovation?” The findings explain the connotation of CSR embeddedness and answer the dynamic embedding process of CSR from the perspective of process. At the same time, the research links CSR and business model innovation which are two separate issues, and finds the direction and path for sustainable business model innovation. Through the description of the process, qualitative information, this paper reveals the black box of the process of embedding CSR into business model innovation, answers the complicated embedding mechanism of the inter circulatory promotion between CSR and business model innovation, provided structural theoretical hypothesis for relevant research topics.The final findings allow entrepreneurs and managers to better understand the process of embedding CSR into business model innovation. Moreover, the theoretical framework is a conceptual instrument that is useful in analyzing and evaluating alternative ways to develop both business and social interests-based on the "creating shared value" principle, will help more enterprises to realize sustainable business model innovation through CSR embeddedness.

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A study of the mechanism of action for the influence factors on development of intelligent manufacturing of new energy equipment

Meng Fansheng, Yu Jianya

2019, 40(5): 57-70.

Abstract ( 209 )

At present, China is at the intersection of energy revolution and equipment manufacturing towards intelligent manufacturing. The energy revolution requires increasing the proportion of new energy in the energy structure to promote low-carbon energy structure, while the transformation from equipment manufacturing to intelligent manufacturing requires that China's equipment manufacturing be able to adapt to the development and changes of the environment and strive to improve enterprise capacity and management level. As a new energy equipment in front of equipment manufacturing development in China, its future intelligent manufacturing level will directly affect the development and utilization prospects of new energy in China, and then affect the low-carbon process of China's energy structure. The existing literature shows that the factors affecting the development of intelligent manufacturing include both external and internal factors. However, most of the previous research results are based on individual factors and lack of systematic and quantitative research. The mechanism of influencing factors on the development of intelligent manufacturing needs further study.This paper assumes that the external environment, enterprise capability, management level and intelligent manufacturing, as well as the external environment and enterprise capability are related. The external environment influences the intelligent development of new energy equipment from three aspects: policy environment, industrial cooperation and industry competition. External environment has a direct positive impact on smart manufacturing; enterprise capability variables are measured by innovation, integration, interconnection and other secondary variables, and the effect of enterprise capability on the development of smart manufacturing of new energy equipment is direct and positive; external environment has a direct positive impact on enterprise innovation capability, integration capability and interconnection capability, and has a direct positive impact on enterprise capability, thereby promoting new energy equipment intelligence. Manufacturing development; management level and enterprise capacity promote each other, which has a positive impact on enterprise capacity. In the process of promoting the development ofintelligent manufacturing of new energy equipment, it will also be enhanced. Management level has a direct and positive impact on enterprise capability, and then affects intelligent manufacturing.Before the formal issuance of large sample questionnaires, a small range of questionnaires were issued for predictive testing, and the reliability and validity of variables were preliminarily tested. The questionnaire was perfected according to the test results, which served as the basis of the formal questionnaire. The questionnaire consists of two parts. The first part is the basic information of the enterprise, including enterprise information, enterprise size and enterprise life. The second part is the main body of the questionnaire, including multiple measurement questions of each research variable. The subjects of the questionnaire were asked by Richter Five-Point Scale. In the pre-test stage, questionnaires are sent out by mail and e-mail, and in the empirical stage, questionnaires are sent out to leaders of new energy equipment manufacturing enterprises and scholars in the field ofintelligent manufacturing of new energy equipment. The validity rate of the questionnaire reached the general standard. In the measurement table part, the scale with good reliability and validity and high recognition in the relevant literature is cited. In this paper, Cronbachs Alpha coefficient method is used to test the reliability of the measurement scale, confirmatory factor analysis is used to test the validity of the survey data, and to judge the fitness of the model. The results show that the internal consistency and reliability of variables such as external environment, enterprise capability, management level and intelligent manufacturing are high, and the validity of these variables' structural models is good. On the basis of confirmatory factor analysis, the maximum likelihood method (ML) is used to validate the model design and related hypothesis of the influencing factors of the intelligent development of new energy equipment. In the process of empirical research, some items in the model are added to make the model pass the test.The empirical results show that the factors affecting the development ofintelligent manufacturing of new energy equipment mainly include external environment, enterprise capacity and management level. The empirical results show that the external environment, enterprise capability and management level are the main factors affecting the development of intelligent manufacturing of new energy equipment. The external environment and management level indirectly drive the development of intelligent manufacturing with enterprise capability as the intermediate variable. At the same time, the external environment has a direct impact on the development of intelligent manufacturing. Policy orientation puts forward the overall requirement for the development of enterprise capability. The upstream and downstream industrial cooperation can promote the communication between upstream and downstream enterprises in the process of intelligent manufacturing of new energy equipment, and has a direct impact on the enterprise capability. Industry competition forces enterprises to seek comparative advantages and makes the differences between enterprises. As can be seen from Figure 7, the external environment has a negative effect on the development ofintelligent manufacturing of new energy equipment. Some enterprises only rely on non-market-oriented means to occupy a monopoly position, or even illegal infringement to obtain profits, resulting in unfair industry competition; while some innovative enterprises are constrained by unfair industry competition, which makes it difficult to show their due innovative income, and the risk of intelligent development of new energy equipment and uncertain cycle factors make the effect of innovative investment obvious. There is a certain lag, which inhibits the endogenous power of the development of intelligent manufacturing of new energy equipment, leading to the new energy equipment manufacturing enterprises have no time to take into account its intelligent development. Enterprise capability can promote the development of intelligent manufacturing. New energy equipment manufacturing enterprises improve their technological innovation ability and strengthen core technology research and development, which plays an important role in promoting enterprises to take the path of innovation-driven development and achieve intelligent manufacturing. Digital integration can be used to design, analyze and optimize every link of production process, different levels, operation steps, production units, production lines and even the whole factory. It is the only way for new energy equipment manufacturing enterprises to realize intelligent manufacturing. New energy equipment manufacturing enterprises need to link up the upstream and downstream supply chains, information between supply and demand, internal products and equipment, people and equipment, so that information can be transferred independently in the industrial chain, and promote the transformation of enterprises from traditional manufacturing mode to intelligent manufacturing.The management level promotes the development of intelligent manufacturing by improving the ability of enterprises. From the point of view of the actual operation of the enterprise, the management level runs through the whole process of the enterprise industry chain, is the "soft power" of the enterprise, mainly plays a supporting and service role, but it is difficult to have a direct impact on the improvement of the enterprise capacity. The management level is more interacted with the external environment to promote the intelligent development of new energy equipment manufacturing enterprises. Information management can quickly collect information about external environment changes for decision-makers to make scientific decisions; organizational management can change organizational structure according to upstream and downstream industrial cooperation or industry competition to meet the development needs of new energy equipment manufacturing enterprises; process management can ensure that new energy equipment manufacturing enterprises maintain a gap in the process of cooperation with upstream and downstream enterprises. Smooth channel, avoid production problems caused by inappropriate coordination.According to the research conclusion of the mechanism of influencing factors, this paper puts forward the relevant policy suggestions from the following three aspects:From the perspective of the external environment of intelligent manufacturing development, the government decision-making departments should clarify the key points and policy orientation of intelligent manufacturing development of new energy equipment, and control the changing trend of influencing factors of intelligent manufacturing development of new energy equipment; industrial organizations should establish and provide some suggestions. Effective cooperation platform, technical and financial support, to ensure the development of new energy equipment smart manufacturing has a greater profit margin; relevant industry departments should guide enterprises to provide differentiated products and services in the process of smart manufacturing development. From the point of view of enhancing the enterprise's own ability, we should improve the ability of independent innovation by training and introducing talents, make technological prediction by scientific means, establish the main direction of technological innovation and implement innovation drive, break through the separation of ERP system and MES system, optimize the business process of each link of the existing industrial chain by using modern information technology, and improve the operation of the industrial chain. Efficiency: We should improve the level of interconnection, establish a rapid information collection and sharing mechanism, realize the dynamic matching of production and demand, and provide customized services for users on demand.From the aspect of improving enterprise management level, we should break the restriction of functional management structure, compress the internal information transmission chain and realize the rapid flow of information by reducing the hierarchical structure in the enterprise organization, establish a perfect information management system, scientifically manage and control the internal information transmission channel to ensure the timely and accurate transmission of information, and establish an effective management communication system. We should find out the contradictions of resource allocation in enterprises in time and take effective measures to solve them.

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A research on the value co-creation behavior coordination mechanism of the innovation ecosystem

Wang Faming, Zhu Meijuan

2019, 40(5): 71-79.

Abstract ( 353 )

As one of the important measures of national “Double Creation” strategy, the construction of innovation ecosystem depends on how to realize the value creation of each participant and how to coordinate the value co-creation behavior of each participant in the process of value creation. Therefore, for the innovation ecosystem, the coordination mechanism of value creation behavior is the key to its stable operation. Based on the perspective of evolutionary game, this paper constructs an evolutionary model of value co-creation coordination mechanism of innovation ecosystem and analyses its evolutionary process. The research on the value creation of innovation ecosystem focuses on the selection of innovative ecosystem partners, the realization of strategic objectives and the relationship between partner selection and the performance of innovation ecosystem. However, in the innovation ecosystem, value co-creation is not only reflected in the satisfaction of the needs of the innovators, but also in providing benefits to all in the process of serving the innovators. In the method, Nash equilibrium analysis based on the assumption of complete rationality is commonly used. In practice, complete rationality is only an ideal hypothesis, but bounded rationality is the norm. The coordination process of the value co-creation behavior of innovation ecosystem is achieved through repeated games. It is a relatively stable cooperative and competitive relationship formed by continuous learning and adjustment from low level to high level. Therefore, using evolutionary game model to study the value co-creation behavior coordination of innovation ecosystem is closer to reality. Based on the above understanding, this paper uses evolutionary game theory to construct a two-population game model, comprehensively considers the factors such as the realization of strategic objectives, fair distribution of benefits and penalty mechanism of partners in innovation ecosystem value creation behavior, and explores the coordination process and key influencing factors of cooperative behavior among government public sectors, focus enterprises and partner enterprises in innovation ecosystem.The so-called coordinating mechanism of innovation ecosystem value co-creation behavior refers to rationally distribute the total benefits of innovation ecosystem cooperation and innovation, and to promote all participants to work together to achieve the goal of cooperation, and to coordinate and cooperate with each participants among the focus enterprises, partner enterprises, and government public sectors in the innovation ecosystem, so as to promote sequential evolution process of the innovation ecosystem from disorder to order and from low-level order to high-level order. Specific coordination mechanism of innovation ecosystem value co-creation behavior consists of two parts: The first is the coordination mechanism at the overall level, which refers to the coordination of cooperative behavior among focus enterprises, partner enterprises and government public sectors. Effective coordination at this level will help the whole innovation ecosystem to reduce innovation costs, improve innovation management and increase innovation efficiency, thereby contributing to the overall performance of the innovation ecosystem. The second is the coordination mechanism at the individual level of the participants, which refers to the coordination of the internal behavior of the participants in the focus enterprises, partner enterprises, and government public sectors. The internal behavior coordination mechanism of innovation ecosystem participants helps to rationally allocate and seamlessly link up innovative resources, realizes information exchange and knowledge sharing, and creates a public technology platform.From the perspective of the overall level of the innovation ecosystem, the influencing factors of coordination mechanism of the innovation ecosystem value co-creation can be summarized in three aspects, namely, benefits, costs, and risks. The benefits mainly include the gains from unilateral cooperation by participants, the gains from deception, the normal gains from the cooperation between partners, and the excess benefits from cooperation. Based on the influencing factors and coordination content of value creation behavior in innovation ecosystem, the basic assumptions are as follows:H1: Innovation ecosystem consists of two parts: Focus Enterprise A and Partner B (Partner Enterprises, Government and related intermediaries are unified and called Partner).H2: When the cooperative behavior of focus enterprises and partners is in a coordinated state, the value of the co-creation behavior of the whole innovation ecosystem will remain dynamic and stable. Once the two parties or one of them take deception strategies, the value of the co-creation behavior of the whole innovation ecosystem will be unstable or even disintegrate.H3: After participating in cooperation, both focus enterprises and partners adopt the strategy set, so both parties follow the bounded rationality. If one party considers changing its strategy, it will inevitably combine its relative adaptability in the strategy set and give priority to the other party's strategy.H4: In the value co-creation behavior of innovation ecosystem, the increase of overall profit, the reduction of total cost and risk are the results of coordination between focus enterprises and partners.The results show that whether the long-term evolution of value co-creation behavior of innovation ecosystem can develop in a comprehensive and coordinated direction is mainly affected by a series of factors, such as the distribution proportion of value co-creation excess income, the cost of coordination and cooperation, the choice of deception strategy income, the benefits of cooperation strategy, and the strength of rewards and penalties. Controlling the proportion of excess benefits allocation and cooperation cost allocation within a reasonable range, further reducing cooperation costs, increasing individual cooperation benefits and cooperation excess benefits, reducing the benefits of deception strategies, and strengthening punishment can promote the coordinated development of partners in value creation of innovation ecosystem.The corresponding conclusions are as follows: (1) Select innovation ecosystem partners carefully. When choosing partners, we should give full consideration to those who have the spirit of cooperation, heterogeneous innovation resources and can trust each other, so that we can achieve complementary advantages and resource sharing in the coordination mechanism of value co-creation of innovation ecosystem. (2) Focus enterprises (leading enterprises) play a key role in innovation ecosystem value creation. They should focus on fostering and supporting their coordination and service functions to partners in innovation ecosystem value creation. (3) Create an appropriate policy environment and external environment to reduce the cost of cooperation on the basis of increasing the excess benefits of cooperative members of innovation ecosystems. (4) Establish and improve the mechanism of social punishment and supervision, increase the punishment for the deception of the participants in the innovation ecosystem, and restrain and eliminate the opportunistic tendency that may arise in the participants of the innovation ecosystem.

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Effects of external social ties on firms’ disruptive innovation

Lin Chunpei, Shen He, Yu Chuanpeng

2019, 40(5): 80-89.

Abstract ( 210 )

Disruptive innovation, as a type of innovation with strategic significance, has become an important tool for companies to develop new products and change the existing market structure. Disruptive innovation has been confirmed to be an effective strategy for new entrants and startups to compete with incumbents or larger competitors. Firm innovative activities are always embedded in a particular social context. In order to enable enterprises to use this tool more effectively, many scholars discuss the conditions and factors that influence disruptive innovation in the organizational level. Former researches emphasize that disruptive innovation origin from the combined effect of resource dependence of enterprises and function over-supply in the market. It is also important for the incumbent enterprises to avoid the loss of disruptive innovation ideas due to the brain drain. Moreover, the effective implementation of disruptive innovation strategies for a firm also requires the acquisition of external innovation resources, and the various external ties formed in the process of social interactions among enterprises are an important source of access to innovative resources. However, due to the variety of the social ties, it is still not clear about the relationship between various external social ties and internal disruptive innovation, which need to be analyzed according to the specific types of social ties outside the enterprise. The external social ties of the enterprises are divided into supply chain ties, competitors’ ties and ties with institutions for knowledge produce and service in this paper. Using a sample of 180 enterprises in Pearl River Delta, some hypotheses are tested with hierarchical regression analysis. The result shows that external social ties of enterprises may have a “double-sword” effect on the generation of disruptive innovation, which means various external social ties may not only have positive influence on disruptive innovation, but also have some dark sides under certain conditions. This study refines the former research by classifying the relationship between enterprise’s external social ties and disruptive innovation according to the types of cooperators, and also has managerial implications for the implementation and management practice of disruptive innovation.Based on the results, this study draws the following conclusions. First, supply chain ties have a significant positive linear impact on disruptive innovation for enterprises. This means that the more frequently firms cooperate with its suppliers and customers, the more beneficial it is for the company to understand the changes in customer preferences and product components, especially in the non-mainstream market. As a result, companies can better identify the niche market and enough technology needed for the development of disruptive innovation in low-end market or new market. This finding supports the former opinions that companies can use this kind of business linkage to search for favorable opportunities of market and technology change, gain useful related information and knowledge, and promote innovative activities inside, including disruptive innovation. Moreover, this study finds that the squared variable of supply chain ties has no significant impact on disruptive innovation, which means there is no nonlinear relationship between them. For the reason that enterprises and customers may have a reciprocal relationship instead of a competitive relationship, their cognitive judgments for supply ties are consistent. Therefore, even if the social ties among the company, its suppliers and its users reach to a high level, it can still bring this company with useful information and knowledge about disruptive innovation.Second, there is a U-shaped curve relationship between competitor ties and disruptive innovation of enterprises. Enterprises and competitors not only compete at the product and market levels, but also need to cooperate with each other to deal with the challenges brought by the changes in the industry’s environmental uncertainty. Hence, the connection between competitors is a complex exchange of information and knowledge. It depends largely on the company’s own understanding and using of this connection whether firms can acquire useful information and knowledge through the social interaction with competitor. In the initial stage of building ties between the two parties, the company lacks understanding of the competitors, and the competitors often provide some untrue data and information on the purpose of self-protection, which is not conducive to the identification of disruptive changes in the environmental turbulence of the industry. However, when the extent of this ties exceeds a certain threshold, the interaction between the two parties continues to increase, and the firm can gradually identify the authenticity of information and the developing trend of the competitors and the entire industry. All of these would help the enterprise to identify and seize the fleeting opportunities of disruptive innovation.Third, there is an inverted U-shaped curve relationship between the ties with institutions for knowledge produce and service and corporate disruptive innovation. This finding further supplements the former studies about the influence of ties intensity on enterprise innovation, which emphasize that there is an optimal level of positive effect of enterprises’ ties with institutions for knowledge produce and service on disruptive innovation. Specifically, before the extent of ties reaches to the optimal point, it is beneficial for the enterprise to strengthen the linkage with institutions for knowledge produce and service. As a result, firms can improve their disruptive technology, enrich technical knowledge about the mainstream functions and market knowledge about the emerging customer groups. When the extent of ties with institutions for knowledge produce and service exceeds the optimal point, the strengthen of social interaction will encourage enterprises to rely much more on the institutions for knowledge produce and service. This lock-in effects will limit the outsourcing of external new ideas and information, and reduce the diversity of problem-solving methods. Even if the opportunities for disruptive innovation appear, these firms are not able to identify effectively.Moreover, the conclusions of this paper have important implications for enterprises to carry out disruptive innovative activities in the context of open innovation. Enterprise innovative activities are always embedded in specific social situations. Due to the limited resources of internal resources and the accelerating speed of knowledge development, firms need to maintain proper interaction with external information and knowledge sources, and adopt different treatment methods according to different types of social ties in order to implement disruptive innovation.

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A research on the influence of R&D investment on excess returns

Liu Bai, Wang Xinzhu

2019, 40(5): 101-109.

Abstract ( 233 )

Mass entrepreneurship and innovation is an important strategy for the development of our country. Innovation and entrepreneurship are significant topic of the present era. More and more enterprises are gradually aware that innovation plays a vital role in enterprises. Whether the innovation investment can really promote the development of enterprises deserves attention. Stock price partly reflects a firm’s operating conditions, and at the same time, it can effectively reflect the results of R&D investment. The excess return of stocks is the difference between the actual return and the expected return. The excess part is an important manifestation of a firm’s development and progress. So, this paper discusses the impact of R&D investment on excess returns. Based on the R&D data and stock prices of Listed Companies between 2008 and 2016, this paper uses Fama and MacBeth regression method to explore the market valuation changes caused by R&D investment in different situations. The results show that the R&D expenditure has a significant positive impact on the excess return rate. At the same time, competition is a problem that must be faced by enterprises. The level of competition will have an impact on the firm’s decision-making and innovative performance. This paper also explores the different effects of R&D investment on excess returns in different competitive environments. The results showed that the level of industry competition can positively moderate the relationship between R&D expenditure and excess returns. However, facing the fierce competition environment, enterprises struggling alone cannot survive for a long time. Only by learning to cooperate with others can they continue to develop. Therefore, this article continues to explore the role of cooperation. The results show that the relationship between R&D and excess returns is more prominent in enterprises with high degree of division of labor, and only in the enterprises with high degree of division of labor, industry competition can play a moderating role. This paper continues to explore the relationship between enterprise competition and cooperation in additional test. And we find that industry competition can further promote the division of enterprises. This shows that R&D can promote the development of enterprises. Also, seeking cooperative partners under the pressure of competition is crucial. Competition is an important part of the external environment factors of enterprises. In the same time, division of labor is a major bridge among enterprises. Competition and cooperation both play a key role in enterprises. This also partly verifies the importance of co-opetition strategy to enterprises. These conclusions provide some enlightenment for the development of enterprises. Firstly, innovation investment is often accompanied by positive stock returns, and R&D investment is conducive to the development of enterprises. Under the environment of "mass entrepreneurship and mass innovation", increasing R&D investment level and enhancing scientific research ability are undoubtedly important means for modern enterprises to cultivate competitive advantage. Managers should pay attention to improving R&D efficiency while encouraging innovation. Secondly, for enterprises in the environment of survival of the fittest, certain competition can effectively promote the progress of enterprises. The existence of competition makes enterprises more cautious in choosing investment. The pressure of competition forces enterprises to invest more cautiously and achieve innovative results more effectively. Finally, high level of competition and high degree of cooperation can further promote the development of enterprises. Competition promotes rational decision-making of managers, while high-level division of labor reduces the cost of production. Effective competition and cooperation strategy will play a vital role in creating value for enterprises.

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Institutional environment and entrepreneurship:A research on its mechanism, effect and policy#br#

Chen Yian, Zhao Xueping

2019, 40(5): 90-100.

Abstract ( 326 )

The entrepreneurship depends on the internal institutional structure of the enterprise and the external institutional environment of the enterprise. But in China, there are still some problems in this area. For example, the basic legal system is imperfect, in some disputes of property rights cases; China’s crackdown on infringements is not strong enough, so that the property and rights of entrepreneurs are not well protected. At the same time, bank lending has certain discrimination against private enterprises to a certain extent, and financing constraints have become the main obstacles on their development path (He Ren, Liu Bingyong, 2012), broken the confidence of entrepreneurs to start a business. In addition, the government's dominance of the economy directly affects the entire process of corporate activities, and is also prone to corruption and other issues.In this context, one natural question arises: does the institutional environment in China have an impact on the entrepreneurship? To answer this question, we will investigate the empirical relationship between institutional environment and entrepreneurship across China’s provinces during the period 2011–2015. We also want to uncover mechanisms involved running from mis-allocation of institutional environment to entrepreneurship.Based on the panel data of China's provincial level in 2011-2015, this paper will comprehensively analyze the influence of institutional environment on entrepreneurship from four aspects: rule of law level, financial development, government regulation and regional corruption.(1) We find that the institutional environment has a significant impact on entrepreneurial innovation and entrepreneurship. Among them, the rule of law and financial development have an coefficient of 0.86 and 0.57 for entrepreneurship, and the government control has an coefficient of -1.05 for entrepreneurship. Regional corruption plays a “lubricating” effect in the development of entrepreneurship. After controlling for endogenous problems, the results are more robust. (2) We find that the four indicators that measure the institutional environment have a stronger explanatory power for entrepreneurial innovation. (3) When considering the interaction between variables, the interaction between the level of the rule of law and financial development is positively related to entrepreneurship; the coefficient of interaction between government regulation and finance is negative. This shows that in the process of studying the role of the institution in the entrepreneurship, we must consider the relationship between various factors within the institutional environment. (4) Economic growth has an incentive effect on the promotion of entrepreneurship, and the level of education has a negative impact on it. In the case of considering endogeneity, the effect of opening up to the outside world and FDI on entrepreneurship is not significant.The conclusion of this paper shows that in order to lead the economic growth with high quality, we should create a good institutional environment for entrepreneurs.Our paper contributes to the existing literature in three different ways: First, this paper measures the institutional environment from the four perspectives: The rules of law, finance, government, and corruption, and studies its macro impact on entrepreneurship. Previous studies have generally focused on a single point of viewin law or finance, so this article enriches the literature to some extent. At the same time, this article uses entrepreneurial innovation and entrepreneurship as indicators to measure entrepreneurship, and enhances the robustness of the results.Secondly, this paper examines the interaction between finance and the rule of law and the interaction between government and finance, and describes the mechanism of influence within the institutional environment, which provides adirection for future research.The research provides empirical evidence on the relationship between institutional environment and entrepreneurship in the process of China's economic transition from high-speed growth to high-quality growth. The conclusions show that the institutional environment is an important factor driving the development of entrepreneurship.Our results have significant implications. Forpolicymakers,strengthen the building of a socialist rule of law system with Chinese characteristics, and formulate and implement a “good law and good policy” that will help the development of private enterprises. Different rules and regulations are needed within the enterprise to constrain the behavior of managers and employees. At the same time, in order to innovate and develop of the enterprise, it is necessary to gradually improve the system of property rights protection, effectively protect various forms of ownership economy according to law, and thus enhance the incentives for enterprises to innovate and start businesses. For researchers who studythe allocation of human capital, the message of the paper is that it is possible to adopt a method of establishing small commercial banks that can provide financial services, and fundamentally eliminate discrimination against private and private enterprises, in view of the existing obstacles such as financing loans to private enterprises.It also combines finance and the rule of law to promote financial development through the rule of law. Accelerate the pace of building a government under the rule of law. When the government introduces relevant policies, it must proceed from the level of the rule of law. Only reasonable intervention in the market will make the market economy become the leading force to lead the high-quality growth of the economy, and also create a good external institutional environment for entrepreneurship.It is important to admit two limitations to our study. First, the indicators for measuring entrepreneurship in this paper are not perfect. In recent years, the state has paid more attention to entrepreneurs. There are more and more standards for testing whether it is a good entrepreneur. Many of the connotations of entrepreneurship are not well quantified. Second, this paper only examines the mechanism of the influence of institutions on entrepreneurship from a macro perspective, and does not consider it from the micro perspective. And it is not accurate enough to choose indicators that measure government regulation.

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A research on the dual mediation mechanism of the impact of technological diversification on innovation performance

2019, 40(5): 110-119.

Abstract ( 296 )

Under the trend of increasingly fierce dynamic competitive environment, accelerated technological updates, and strengthened innovation synergy, it is urgent for enterprises to integrate diversified technologies to conduct their new product R&D and manufacture. It is also a plausible way for enterprises to gain competitive advantages using unique and differentiated products, in coping with the challenges emerged from producing multi-tech products, implementing complicated processes as well as faster product update speed. To scan from outside the enterprise, the emerging of new technological and industrial evolution aggravates the environmental uncertainty, which forces enterprises to keep on learning new technologies and broadening their own technology scope, in order to survive other than being replaced. In such context, technological diversification strategy characterized by various knowledge bases has been highly emphasized in academia and practice.However, existing researches on the relationship between technological diversification and innovation performance have mixed findings, resulting in positive, negative and also non-liner relationships. This paper argues that, the main reasons for above inconsistent results lie in the following two aspects. 1) Previous researches failed to distinguish different technological diversification type, while each type has its own characteristics and thus fits particular application situations. Following this line of reasoning, technological diversification is further divided into two types in this paper, which are technological breadth and depth diversification. Their impact on innovation is further analyzed in-depth and respectively. 2) Although existing analyses have verified the impact of technological diversification on innovation performance from various perspectives, the influencing mechanism is still unclear. The role of technological diversification on innovation performance is not “taken for granted”, as diversified technologies cannot transform automatically to promote innovation. Either the evolution of knowledge diversification or the increasing of technology scope and domain are both the dynamic process of knowledge accumulation, which requires effective knowledge absorption and utilization. In order to explore the underlying mechanism, two constructs from organizational capability perspective are introduced in this paper, which are absorptive capability and technology integration capability, to reveal their different mediating role on the relationship between technological diversification and innovation performance.Based on above analysis, this paper establishes following theoretical framework of “technological breadth and depth diversification - absorptive capacity and technology integration capability - innovation performance” from knowledge-based theory and organizational capability perspective. The regression results utilizing data from 303 manufacturing companies listed in Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets show that: 1) both technological breadth diversification and technological depth diversification positively impact on innovation performance significantly; and 2) absorptive capability and technology integration capability have different mediating impact on the main effect, specifically speaking, technological breadth diversification mainly promotes innovation performance through absorptive capacity, while technological depth diversification primarily influences innovation performance via technology integration capability.This paper has following theoretical implications. First, previous research regarded technological diversification as a whole and explored its impact on innovation performance, which led to conflicting conclusions. This paper deepens the distinct influencing mechanism by subdividing technological diversification into two types, namely technological breadth diversification and technological depth diversification, exploring their effect on innovation in detail. The two technological diversification modes discussed in this paper deepens the various influencing situations technological diversification can have on an enterprise.Second, existing researches on the influence of technological diversification on innovation performance have yielded meaningful results. However, it still lacks in-depth analysis on the mechanism in between. To fill this gap, absorptive capability and technological integration capability are analyzed as mediations impacting on the main effect between technological diversification and innovation performance. With this effort, this paper enriches mediation mechanism from organizational capability perspective.Third, in the process of mediation mechanism analysis, this paper explores both absorptive capability and technology integration capability’s mediating role on two technological diversification modes’ influence on innovation performance. To be more specific, absorptive capability and technology integration capability’s mediating role are compared, improving the research on technological diversification and innovation performance.This research also has critical managerial implications for enterprises to establish competitive advantage. First of all, there is now a developmental trend for manufacturing enterprises to expend their technology bases and scope to better respond to the challenges of environment uncertainty and product complexity. With the context of complicated technologies and synergetic innovation, traditional manufacturing mode is hard to sustain. To get out of this “low-end lock-in” dilemma and further make it to realize the transformation from “Made in China” to “Created in China”, manufacture enterprises need to accumulate diversified innovation technologies, and nurture innovation capability based on synergetic development of above technologies.Secondly, during its implementation of diversification technology strategy to acquire sustainable competitive advantages, manufacture enterprises need to choose suitable technology diversification mode to fit their own situations, avoiding falling into the “diversification in blind” trap. Technology diversification can be subdivided into technology breadth diversification and technology depth diversification, and/or other classifications. Thus, an enterprise needs to distinguish and recognize its own innovation direction and technology position clearly, thus to timely choose suitable technological diversification mode matching its own situation, and align its innovation resources properly.Thirdly, manufacture enterprises need to emphasis on the fitness of different technological diversification mode and its own capability, to make full use of its technology diversification strategy. The breadth and depth dimension of technological diversification have different influencing mechanism on innovation performance, which inspires enterprises to conduct various knowledge activities to build its absorptive capability and technology integration capability based on their own technology traits, in order to better absorb and integrate knowledge in various domain and achieve higher innovation performance.

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Technology acquisition mode, technology spillovers and innovation performance: A case study in farmers co-operatives

Luo Jianli, Guo Hongdong, Jia Fu

2019, 40(5): 120-133.

Abstract ( 239 )

Government-led technological innovation system in China is facing serious challenges. Farmers cooperatives play a significant role in promoting agricultural technological innovation. As a typical labor managed firms, cooperatives differ greatly from traditional investor-owned firms (IOF) in terms of enterprise objectives, employment patterns, democratic decision-making mechanism and profit distribution. The special governance structure of farmers cooperatives and the special characteristics of public products of agricultural technological innovation, determine the unique endowment of technological innovation in farmers cooperatives. Based on eight typical cases, this study constructs the typology of technological innovation model in farmers cooperatives from two dimensions of technology acquisition mode and technology spillovers. We mapped out four types of technological innovation model in farmers cooperatives, including grassroot social innovation (GSI), grassroot commercial innovation (GCI), introduced social innovation (ISI) and introduced commercial innovation (ICI). We adopt the paradigm of “innovation mode – innovation performance – policy implication” to answer three questions. (1) What are the characteristics of technological innovation in farmers cooperatives and the differences from traditional IOF? (2) Farmers cooperatives have the genes of sustainable development. Besides economic performance, does technological innovation in cooperatives has social performance? How to Evaluate the technological innovation performance in cooperatives. (3) Since agricultural technological innovation has the characteristics of public goods, public policies should give appropriate incentives. From the perspective of policy subdivision and applicability, how should we formulate corresponding policy advocacy according to the technological innovation model in cooperatives to improve the pertinence and efficiency of policy implementation?By coding eight cases, we find that two concepts of technology acquisition mode and technology innovation spillover are very adaptive to construct typology of technological innovation in cooperatives. This has more theoretical and practical significance for understanding the characteristics of technological innovation, innovation performance and policy advocacy for farmers cooperatives.This study divides the technology acquisition mode of cooperatives into internal acquisition and external acquisition. The mode selection of technology acquisition in cooperatives are affected by three factors, namely entrepreneur capital, technological characteristics and government support. Compared with IOF, the mode selection of technology acquisition in cooperatives has unique characteristics. The factors affecting the technology spillover rate in cooperatives mainly include patent protection, technology embodiment, technology innovation cost and knowledgetacitness. Compared with IOF, technological innovation in farmers cooperatives has greater spillover rate. Technological innovation with high spillover rate has the nature of social innovation, while innovation with low spillover rate has the nature of traditional commercial innovation. Therefore, from the perspective of technology spillover, the technological innovation in cooperatives can be divided into social innovation and commercial innovation.A typology of four technological innovation modes can assist to offer policy recommendations. (1) GSI having a greater spillover effect, can improve social welfare. Meanwhile, its economic performance is relatively low since GSI with greater spillover needs to invest human capital and innovation funds. Therefore, the policy advocacy should focus on providing a financial compensation to cooperatives' innovative behavior，and encourage grassroot innovators in both spiritual and material terms. (2) In the model of GCI, grassroots in cooperatives independently develop relevant technologies. These technologies have a small spillover rate by commercializing innovation technologies. Cooperatives can monopolize the benefits of technological innovation and get higher economic performance. GCI can also improve the income of surrounding farmers by driving to use the innovative achievements. Therefore, GCI has a certain (medium) social performance. However, the technical level in grassroots innovation is relatively low. Therefore, the government should encourage cooperatives to carry out cooperative innovation with other scientific research institutions, and further enhance the technological level of existing technologies. (3) In the ICI model, farmers’ cooperatives introduce external technologies and reduce the spillover effect through commercializing the technologies to obtain innovative benefits. Through ICI has higher economic benefits, cooperatives can also get certain social performance by promoting the surrounding farmers to use these innovation technologies. In this model, innovation technologies mainly come from profitable and non-profitable research institutes. For non-profitable research institutes, the government should improve the conversion rate of technology achievements and the coverage of technology promotion. For profitable research institutes, if the technologies have high social performance, the government should provide the corresponding funds to support cooperatives to introduce these technologies. (4) In the ISI model, cooperatives introduce technologies from scientific research institutes, and improve the conversion rate of technology achievements through experimental demonstration. Therefore, ISI has higher social performance. However, the economic performance is at a medium level because cooperatives cannot monopolize the innovation benefits. Therefore, the government should pay attention to the transformation of technological achievements and encourage scientific research institutes to promote technology through cooperatives.This study contains the following theoretical and practical values. (1) A typology of four technological innovation modes is constructed from two dimensions of technology spillover and technology acquisition modes. It not only reveals the black box of technological innovation in farmers’ cooperatives, but also makes a beneficial supplement to the technological innovation in traditional IOF. (2) This study breaks through the limitations of previous studies on organizational technological innovation performance only from the economic perspective. On account of the sustainable development gene in cooperatives, it introduces the triple bottom line performance evaluation principle to study the economic performance and social performance of technological innovation in cooperatives. (3) there are great differences between farmers' cooperatives and investors-owned firms in technological innovation mode and innovation performance. Firstly, from the perspective of technology acquisition mode, the technological innovation in cooperatives is generally initiated bygrassroot people, such as technological talents in cooperatives. Internal acquisition mode is a source of typical grassroot innovation. While the technological innovation in IOF is accomplished by the innovation team. Secondly, from the perspective of technology spillover, technologies in most cooperatives have high spillover effect and the nature of social innovation. However, IOF will reduce spillover effect to maximize the profits of firms. Most of the technological innovations in IOF belong to the category of commercial innovation. Thirdly, farmers’ cooperatives have the genes of sustainable development. In the process of implementing technological innovation, cooperatives not only pursue economic performance, but also have higher social and environmental performance. While OIF usually aims at pursuing economic performance.

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Firm heterogeneity, internal control and corporate innovation performance

2019, 40(5): 134-144.

Abstract ( 482 )

Under the background of the new economic normal and the initiative of “Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation”, innovations have become increasingly prominent for establishing companies' competitive advantages and driving economic growth. According to the statistics of the National Bureau of Statistics, China's R&D investment has increased continuously in recent years, but most enterprises are not efficient in technological innovation. A growing literature has shown that the external environment will have an impact on innovation performance, such as institutional environment, financial market development, and competition. However, in the case of the same external environment, those enterprises whose scale and market influence are similar will have different innovation performances which can only be explained from the internal of the company. However, prior research on innovation has also focused on the framework of traditional corporate governance theory, such as equity structure, board composition, and executive incentives. Internal control, which is one of the important internal governance mechanisms of modern enterprises, plays an important role in reducing agency costs, improving the quality of accounting information, and ensuring asset security. However, few studies examine the link between internal control and innovation. In 2008, “Basic Standards for Internal Control” was jointly issued by China’s Ministry of Finance and other five ministries, which clarified the three objectives of internal control, compliance objectives, reporting objectives and business objectives. Existing research has paid more attention to the function of compliance objectives and reporting objectives, whiles less to the role of business objectives. While, this paper examines the operational objectives of internal control from the perspective of innovation, because innovation not only reflects the efficiency of enterprise management, but also reflects the sustainable development strategy.Then, can internal control improve the innovation performance? Are there different differences in the effects of different characteristics of enterprises? What role does the five elements of internal control play? In order to answer the questions, this paper examines the effect of internal control on innovation performance investigated by Poisson regression, based on the sample of A-share listed companies in SSE and SZSE from 2007 to 2014. Furthermore, this paper conducts a group test according to the heterogeneity of the enterprises, the nature of property rights, R&D intensity and firm size; and further analyzes the impact of five elements of internal control on innovation performance. The Poisson regression model is used in this paper because the number of patent grants is a non-negative integer, and the Poisson distribution is more suitable. In the field of innovation, the Poisson regression model has been recognized by many scholars in recent years.Compared with daily business activities and tangible assets investment, innovation activities have the characteristics of long cycle, high risk and difficult information evaluation. Therefore, there are higher contract cost, supervision cost and agency cost, at the same time the innovation information is more easily underestimated, which seriously affect the innovation performance of enterprises. This paper argues internal control can improve the performance of technological innovation through possible underlying mechanisms that reducing internal agency costs and information transfer costs. Specifically, in the whole process of innovation activities, that is, in the aspects of R&D investment, production and output, internal control enhances innovation performance by restricting agency behavior of management and employee, enhancing information transmission. In terms of property rights, the management is more likely to override the internal control in SOE, while supervision mechanism is relatively sound in Non-SOE. Therefore, compared with SOE, internal control plays a greater role in promoting innovation in Non-SOE. In terms of R&D intensity, because technological innovation requires a more relaxed innovation environment and high tolerance for failure, the higher the quality of internal control reduces the tolerance for failure to a certain extent, and the innovation could be inhibited more in high R&D investment intensity companies. Therefore, compared with high R&D investment intensity companies, the role of internal control in promoting innovation performance is more pronounced in low R&D investment intensity companies. In terms of enterprise scale, the higher the internal control quality could reduce more the internal agency costs and information transmission in large-scale enterprises, and improve the innovation performance. Because the role of internal control depends on the five elements of internal control, further this paper analyzes the role of the five elements of internal control on innovation performance, and finds that risk assessment and information and communication elements play a significant role in promoting innovation performance. This paper takes technological innovation as the starting point, expands the research on the effect of internal control on improving the efficiency of enterprise operation, makes up for the deficiency of existing research on the internal control business objective only from the perspective of tangible assets, and demonstrates the applicability principle of the implementation of internal control system. It provides empirical evidence for promoting and improving the implementation of the Code, improving innovation performance, and promoting industrial upgrading and transformation of business models under the new economic normal.The research results of this paper have certain enlightenment for government departments and enterprises to steadily promote the construction of internal control system, improve internal governance mechanism and change business model. Specifically for the government, this conclusion provides empirical evidence for the comprehensive promotion and implementation of the internal control system, which will promote the internal control of small and medium-sized board and GEM listed companies, and comprehensively improve the quality and risk prevention capabilities of listed companies in China. For enterprises, the role of internal control in improving the efficiency of business management is clarified. Internal control can not only improve the efficiency of tangible assets management, but also intangible assets management. Effective internal control over intangible assets is can better prevent risks, enhance information exchange and enhance innovation efficiency. At the same time, we must pay attention to the coordination of the relationship between internal control and innovation to find the equilibrium point of them. Not only to give full play to the governance role of internal control, but also to stimulate the enthusiasm of innovation, and continuously improve the level of enterprise innovation.

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A study of the construction of IT capability and its impact on the harmonized informatization of an enterprise

Qi Xiaomei, Lou Runping, Cheng Junhui

2019, 40(5): 145-154.

Abstract ( 202 )

Pursuant to the harmony management theory, IT capability is reconstructed on the basis of resource-based theory and dynamic capability theory. This article divide the IT capability into IT physical elements ability, IT human ability and IT human-physical elements interactive ability, and puts forward the IT physical elements ability to pass the "design optimization of control mechanism" to build, IT human elements ability to pass the "move to change the evolution mechanism" to build, IT human-physical interactive ability through "coupling mechanism" to build. On the basis of referring to relevant scales, the measurement scales of IT physical elements ability, IT human elements ability and IT human-physical interaction ability are developed.Based on the theory ofharmonized informatization system, this paper divides harmonized informatization into two dimensions: "strategic consistency" and "harmonious coupling". On the basis of referring to relevant scales, the measurement scales of "strategic consistency" and "harmonious coupling" are developed. Based on the theory of harmony management and the theory of harmonized informatization system, this paper gives the new connotation of harmonious informatization and puts forward that harmonized informatization is the performance of enterprise informatization and also a development direction of enterprise informatization.Through the empirical study of 281 samples of Chinese enterprises in south China, the reliability and validity of IT capability scale construction are verified, as well as the reliability and validity of harmony information scale. The empirical study shows that IT capability has better structural characteristics of three dimensions, and harmonized informatization has better structural characteristics of two dimensions.This paper constructs a theoretical model of the impact of IT capability on enterprise harmoniousinformatization, proposes research hypotheses, and tests the theoretical model through structural equation model. The empirical results show that the interaction ability of IT human and IT physical is the key ability to realize the harmonious informatization of enterprises, while the ability of IT material elements and the ability of IT human elements can only be regarded as the basis of building the interaction ability of IT characters. This shows that enterprises can only rely on improving the interaction ability of IT human and IT physical if they want to improve the performance of harmonious informatization. The enterprise case study based on Hainan province also proves the correctness of the conclusion.The research of this paper shows that, in the management practice, on the one hand, the IT infrastructure connecting all business departments and even the whole enterprise should be built inside the enterprise to achieve the information sharing within the enterprise, and the information system should be easy to upgrade and optimize, the information system should adopt standardized technical components as far as possible. On the other hand, IT personnel and IT department should be able to communicate well with the business department and establish a mutual trust relationship. IT personnel should be able to understand the key business processes of the enterprise and care about the organizational change and growth. Both IT department and enterprise should establish a long-term cooperative relationship based on trust with key IT providers and service providers. Only in this way can the enterprise information system planning be closely integrated with the enterprise strategic planning, and the cooperation between the core enterprises of the supply chain be close, so as to achieve the enterprise harmoniousinformatization performance.In the future research, we can take the interaction ability of IT human and IT physical as the theme of harmony, analyze their specific performance in each stage of enterpriseinformatization, and make scientific improvement plan to promote the realization of enterprise harmonious informatization performance.

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A research on the relationship between technological innovation network routines and relationship mechanisms

Chang Hongjin, Ji Yingdong, Hu Linna

2019, 40(5): 155-163.

Abstract ( 279 )

With the rapid development of technology, it is difficult for a single enterprise to fully grasp the latest knowledge required for technological innovation. Therefore, the technological innovation activities of enterprises are increasingly relying on the innovation network to provide more valuable resources and information. The technology innovation network is a collection of relationships among member companies, which determines that the essence of its governance is the relationship governance between network member organizations. The key of whether the operation of the technology innovation network is successful is whether its relationship mechanism can ensure the simultaneous interaction and coordinated cooperation between the cooperative members. That is, the relationship mechanism is the core content of network organization governance. At present, many technology innovation companies have found that there are relatively stable routines in the technology innovation network. Network routines can coordinate the relationship between network members and promote inter-firm cooperation. For instance, Toyota relies on its unique culture and cooperation routines to achieve its relationship with partners in its knowledge sharing network. Therefore, technological innovation network routines have an important impact on the relationship mechanism between member companies.Although scholars have made some useful explorations on the relationship between network routines and relationship mechanisms, the existing researches still have the following shortcomings: The first, scholars have not yet analyzed the impact of different dimensions of network routines on relationship mechanisms. It has been suggested that the construction of the routines includes two aspects of behavior and cognition. Therefore, it is necessary to comprehensively understand the influence of technological innovation network routines on the relationship mechanisms from two aspects of behavior and cognition. The second, most scholars study the relationship mechanism as a single-dimensional variable. However, the technological innovation network is a typical loose and coupled organization. And the maintenance of the relationship requires complete multi-dimensional mechanisms. Based on the above deficiencies, this paper will regard the relationship mechanism as a multi-dimensional variable, and will discuss the influence of technological innovation network routines on the inter-enterprises relationship mechanism between enterprises from two aspects of behavior and cognition.Based on Dang and Sun’s definition and dimension division of network routines, this paper divides the innovation network routines into two dimensions: cooperative innovation behavior agreement and innovation network specification consensus. And this paper usesLavie's dimension division of the relationship mechanism into three dimensions: common trust, relationship commitment and relationship embedding. The theoretical hypothesizes of the influence of technological innovation network routines on the relationship mechanism were proposed. In this paper, companies in biopharmaceuticals, electronic information industry, high-end manufacturing, precision instrument manufacturing and other industries with obvious characteristics of innovation and cooperation among enterprises are selected to be surveyed. This paper firstly uses the collaborative relationship accumulated by the author in earlier research to form an innovation network including 450 companies based on 15 companies such as BeijingJiaoda Micro Technology Co., Ltd., Datang Telecom Technology Co., and ZTE et. al. Then, 300 sample companies were selected by stratified sampling in the formed network. Questionnaires are distributed to companies mainly in the form of direct visits and emails. The research activities were carried out from February 2013 to July 2014. The questionnaire results are built into a database, and the establishment of the database is ensured by its data input and verification. The total effective questionnaire for recycling involved 291 sample companies. And the multivariate regression verification for the survey data of 291 domestic enterprises was carried out.It is found that in technological innovation networks, cooperative innovation behavior agreement strengthens the mutual trust between enterprises and improves the level of commitment between enterprises. In the innovation network, repeated behavior patterns between enterprises influence the level of trust between enterprises through the relationship expectations. Trust may be caused by the occurrence of learn and continuous relationship anticipation of the group in frequent transactions. According to this view, trust is gradually established over time through interactions and experiences between firms. Collaborative and innovative behaviors between partners can quickly and efficiently solve the coordination problems that arise during the cooperation process, which improves the level of mutual trust between enterprises and increases the willingness of cooperation between enterprises in the future.At the same time, Innovation network specification consensus improves the level of mutual trust, and promotes the improvement of the level of relationship commitment between enterprises, but reduces the level of relationship embedding. In the innovation network, the common understanding of the common norms of the network between enterprises can reduce the misunderstanding between enterprises. Thus the enterprises more prefer their partners. And it is easier for enterprises to believe the other partners. Therefore the enterprises have more willing to maintain such cooperation in the future. However, because the consensus of the innovation network standard forms a fixed mindset among partners, this mode of thinking will exclude corporate members who are inconsistent with corporate values and ideas, so that enterprises will ignore the attention to novel knowledge, reduce the contact of novel knowledge source.The conclusion of the study provides a new way for enterprises to strengthen their interactions among enterprises, reach consensus, improve the relationship mechanism between enterprises, acquire more network resources, and improve the innovation performance of enterprises. Firstly, it helps to coordinate the relationship between cooperative enterprises in the technology innovation network. The conclusions of this paper show that cooperative innovation behavior agreement in the innovation network strengthens the mutual trust between enterprises and promotes the relationship commitment between enterprises. Secondly, Innovation network specification consensus helps to improve mutual trust and relationship commitment among enterprises. Therefore, member companies in the innovation network should negotiate together and sum up experience in repeated interactions, and thus improve the level of behavior agreement between enterprises. At the same time, through active communication and communication, enterprises should have a clear understanding of the established norms in the process of cooperation. And enterprises should apply the roles of the routines to deal with the contradictions and conflicts in the technological innovation network. Thus the level of collaboration between enterprises will be improved and ultimately the performance of network innovation will be improved.

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A study of the evolution of industrial generic technology R&D behaviors and their multiple failures

Zheng Yuelong1,2, Yang Bai2, Wang Lin2

2019, 40(5): 164-174.

Abstract ( 293 )

In 19th CPC National Congress, Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and Chinese president, pointed out that Innovation is the primary driving force behind development, it is the strategic underpinning for building a modernized economy, and highlighted the underpinning role of key generic technology breakthroughs. Generic technology play a key role in occupying a dominant position in the global industrial chain for’s manufacturing industry in China. However, generic technology R&D, which has the characteristics of long R&D period, large investment and knowledge spillovers, must be faced with the double uncertainty of technology and market. Generic technology R&D tends to fall into dilemmas of "market failure", "organizational failure", "diffusion failure" and "absence of government", which makes generic technology become unsustainable and the obstacle of industry development in China. Therefore, the research work on generic technology R&D and multiple failures with enterprises as the main body is the internal requirement of innovation-driven development and modernized economy system in China, which has an important theoretical and practical significance. However, the existing researches only discuss the certain link failure of industrial generic technology R&D process, and rarely study on the generic technology R&D failures from the generic technology R&D process perspective. Therefore, through building the analysis framework of generic technology R&D process, this paper analyzes the roots of generic technology R&D failures and reveals that the properties and regulation are two roots of R&D failures. Then, this paper analyzes the evolution dynamics of generic technology R&D behavior by building evolutionary game model. Here are main results: generic technology R&D failure is the dynamic evolution result of enterprise weigh R&D benefit. When the level of commonality of generic technology is large, it is difficult to avoid the failures of industrial generic technology R&D only depending on market mechanism. Moreover, under the market mechanism, The greater the risk and cost of R&D, the weaker the benefits exclusivity, the more difficult the subsequent commercial development, the smaller the expected benefits of generic technologies, the greater the expected benefits of other market opportunities, the lower the enterprise’s demand for generic technologies and the lower the cost of acquisition, it is easier for generic technology to produce R&D failure. Government supports are good for alleviating R&D failures. The knowledge and technology supports are more effective in alleviating R&D failures than subsidy.Based on the above findings, a theoretical framework is established from the supply and diffusion perspectives, which reveal that generic technology lies in the range from basic science to commercial applications. There is a "commonality range" with different level of commonality, which divides generic technologies into three regions. The region I represents the high level of commonality, the region III represents the low level of commonality, the region II is in between the two, the closer to the basic science (such as the region I), the more generic technology is far away from the market, the weaker the research motivation for enterprises, and the greater the probability of generic technology R&D failure. Accordingly, this paper reveals the possible multiple failures of generic technology R&D from the cause’s point of view, including the "supply failure" of risk aversion, knowledge spillover and investments alternative, the "diffusion failure" of difficult subsequent development, bad market forecast and investment alternative. The "government supports failure" may occur if government supports are not strong enough or in an inappropriate manner. Finally, this paper proposes some policy suggestions to alleviate generic technology R&D multiple failures,details are as follows:Firstly, the contingency mechanism of government support for generic technology R&D should be established. Government should provide flexible support according to the R&D strength of enterprises and the strong and weak of the level of commonality. For example, for the generic technology of region I, if the R&D strength for enterprise is strong, government should tend to give subsidy support. Instead, government should give knowledge and technology support. At the same time, government should issue the supply and diffusion policies of generic technology in order to stimulate enterprises’ intrinsic needs for generic technology and invest more innovation resources in generic technology, and then effectively alleviate the "supply failure" of risk aversion and knowledge spillover.Secondly, the aid mechanism should be designed by coordinating commonality level and subsequent development difficulty. Due to the importance of generic technology to the industrial transformation and upgrading, government should establish aid mechanisms based on the strong or weak of commonality level and the difficult or easy of subsequent development. For example, the generic technology which is located in region I and difficult to subsequent commercial development, government should not only maintain the enterprises’ supply enthusiasm but also avoid the worry of subsequent. Right now government should collaboratively provide subsidies and knowledge technology support to alleviate the"supply failure" of risk aversion and the "diffusion failure" and "supply failure" of subsequent development difficulty.Thirdly, government should cultivate market demand and environment of products based on generic technology. Although cultivating the market is the last link of generic technology R&D, but it will be good for generic technology supply, diffusion and subsequent commercial developmentdue to the good market expectations for enterprise. So cultivating market should become the policies focus. For this reason, relevant departments should regularly publish market demand and prospect forecast by entrusting authoritative agencies, and should issue relevant support policies based on the marketization of generic technology products in order to avoid the "supply failure" and "diffusion failure" of bad market expectations.In conclusion, the coordinated implementation of the above policies will also help to strengthen the enterprises’ confidence and invest innovation resources in generic technology, and stimulate good expectations of enterprises for generic technology market prospects, thereby alleviating the"government supports failures" and the "supply failure" and "diffusion failure" of investment substitution. The research results in this paper will provide guidance for clarifying the multiple failures and evolution mechanisms of generic technology R&D, and also provide reference for the government to formulate policies to alleviate multiple failures.

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A critical thinking on commercialization of scientific and technological knowledge

Wen Jianying

2019, 40(5): 175-181.

Abstract ( 164 )

The advent of the era of knowledge-based economy has put the interaction and relevance of scientific and technological knowledge and social economy under the spotlight, two spheres which we used to think that they kept each other at arm’s length for such a long history. While at the same time, the Knowledge-based Economy also unexpectedly resulted in and magnified the contradiction, which didn’t exist at all before, between knowledge production and knowledge consuming, both cognitively and practically. Transformation of scientific and technological achievements, also known as commercialization of scientific and technological knowledge, is an obviously effective and indispensable way to deal with knowledge paradox, to enhance technology transfer, and to promote social welfare. Nevertheless, as both empirical evidences and theoretical analyses indicate, keeping knowledge and human resources who embrace know-why and know-how floating, strengthening academic excellence of university are but just two imperatives if commercialization or transformation is to be achieved successfully.Knowledge paradox is a situation in which knowledge produced for public interest unexpectedly undermined social welfare at last due to the fact that knowledge produced hasn’t been fully taken advantage of in one way or another. Knowledge paradox was at first used to depict the situation of Sweden, but soon it was taken as a popular social phenomenon all around the world, including Europe, America and of course China. TheKnowledge paradox, specifically, is derived at least from two reasons as follows: On the one side, the role separation of knowledge producer and knowledge consumer led to uneven balance between knowledge producing and knowledge consuming; and on the other side, too much attention was paid to the economic value of scientific knowledge which contributed directly to the cognitive and practical contradiction of knowledge. Commercialization of scientific knowledge is a process in which knowledge produced by research institution is transferred to technology commercially, or transformed to the final creation of new products, new techniques, new materials and new industries -- all for the purpose of enhancing the real productive forces. Scientific knowledge, which is regarded as public good in terms of Paul Samuelson and having universal and disinterested ethos in terms of Robert Merton, has long been thinking as a way to satisfy individual researcher’s curiosity instead of an instrument to make money before the completion of the process of institutionalization of science. Yet this is not to say that scientific knowledge has never been used as way to promote social welfare by transferring it to new technology and new methods. In the long river of history of science and technology, generally speaking, most academic researchers all over the world felt disgusting on utilitarianism in their daily work. However, things changed dramatically when it comes to late 1970s, when America initiated Bay-Dole Act to promote commercialization of scientific knowledge in order to get rid of the burden of knowledge paradox. Vannivar Bush, the forefather of science and technology policy and the author of Science: The Endless Frontier, outlined the blueprint of process of science. But his nave linear model of development was refuted totally both theoretically and practically later on. Either National Innovation System, Triple Helix, or Mode 2 is indicating that the boundary of knowledge production, transmission and transferring is in flux and is always under construction all the time. In fact, non-linear development, interaction between knowledge producer and consumer may contribute to the prosperity of both science and society. So obviously, promoting commercialization of scientific knowledge by national policy intentionally is a necessary and promising way to enhance the capability of transforming and commercializing scientific knowledge in order to go beyond knowledge paradox. However, not all researchers and universities who want to commercialize their scientific knowledge really harvest their golden eggs as they wished. Mounting evidences imply that those star scientists who published more scientific papers than their peers in top journals, and those universities which are famous for their excellent original scientific research, are also pioneers in successful commercialization of scientific knowledge and in making profit from that commercialization. There is no doubt that it is too early to come to a general conclusion that everybody agrees upon about such an emerging thing as commercialization of scientific knowledge. But the truth is that whether you like it or not, once commercialization of scientific knowledge is initiated by one country successfully, any other countries will emulate fiercely in one way or another, just like what they did in every technological revolution we had experienced in our history. Nevertheless, it would be definitely wrong and totally harmful to put excessive emphasis on intellectual property protection and secrecy. By the same token, it would do no good to commercialization of scientific knowledge if commercialization itself gets focused exclusively, without paying the same attention to original innovation on science and technology. It is also obvious that there is no simple linear model between knowledge producing and profit making from that knowledge. Thus, a tentative conclusion is that it might be the greatest contribution to regional economy for universities to do to cultivate more potential scientists and technologists who harbor the commercial ethos in their mind while at the time would like to stick to the normative structure of science rather than make money themselves blatantly and intentionally.

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A distorted system: First author rule and co-authored papers

Li Lei, Fan Ziying

2019, 40(5): 182-192.

Abstract ( 209 )

In recent years, the standardization of the research method and the improvement of publishing requirements have made it more difficult for researchers to publish independently. More and more researchers choose to engage in cooperative research. Taking the three important periodicals of economics and management in China: Social Sciences in China, Economic Research Journal and Management World as examples, the proportion of cooperative papers was only 32% in 2000 and had risen to 90% by 2014, which shows that cooperative research has become the mainstream trend. However, there are costs in cooperative research, especially due to the long-standing first author evaluation rule in China, which makes the coordination cost of cooperative research increase sharply. The first author rule is mainly derived from the contribution-based signature mechanism. Compared with the first-name alphabetical order prevalent in international journals, signature by contribution highlights the contribution of the first author, which correspondingly weakens the cooperative benefits of non-first authors. In high-quality research, every collaborator needs to make a lot of efforts, and the importance of contribution is often difficult to distinguish. Signature by contribution is obviously not an optimal result. In the case that only the first author is recognized in scientific research evaluation rule in universities, the benefit from cooperation (reflected in title promotion and scientific research awards) of non-first authors is basically zero. The existence of this benefit distribution mechanism will greatly reduce the probability of cooperation among researchers. Some existing studies have qualitatively analyzed the impact of the first author rule on cooperative incentives, but so far, the quantitative research in this area is still scant.This paper collects the scientific research evaluation rule of "985" universities and universities of finance and economics by the questionnaire survey and matches it with the published data of three major economics and management journals. Based on the quasi-natural experiment of adjusting the first author rule in some universities from 2000 to 2014, this paper uses the difference-in-differences method (DID) to investigate the effect of scientific research evaluation rule on co-authored papers. The results show thatthe non-first author rule in the professional qualifications institution can significantly stimulate teachers to cooperate, increasing about 33.5%, while awarding institution has no effect. Considered the heterogeneity of cooperation, the non-first author rule mainly promotes inter-university cooperation and has no obvious impact on inner cooperation. However, the abolishing of the first author rule may also lead to the emergence of the academic "free rider" behavior like "fake cooperation". After solving this problem, we find that the non-first author rule still promotes cooperation. Based on these conclusions, we analyze the impact mechanism from the perspective of promotion pressure. The results show that the non-first author rule in the professional qualifications institution has cooperative incentives only for teachers who have not yet been promoted to professors, but has no significant impact on teachers who have become professors.The contribution of this paper is mainly embodied in three aspects. Firstly, this paper quantitatively evaluates the impact of the first author rule on the co-authored paper incentive for the first time. Previous literature mainly explores the reasons for cooperative research from the perspectives of author's personal characteristics and thesis's characteristics. A few literature on the impact of scientific research evaluation rule on the co-authored paper only analyzes qualitatively. This paper identifies the impact of the first author rule on cooperative incentives with the DID method by the quasi-natural experiments of adjusting the first author rule in some universities. Secondly, by the form of the questionnaire survey, we make statistics and descriptions on the scientific research evaluation rule of domestic universities in economics and management disciplines, which is of great significance to grasp the current situation of the construction of scientific research rule in universities. The results of the questionnaire survey show that, as time goes on, more and more universities begin to recognize the non-first-author paper, which is an important opportunity for researchers to strengthen academic cooperation and engage in important research with an international perspective. Finally, in the definition of paper cooperation, the previous literature only takes the number of paper’s authors into consideration, and we not only consider the number of paper’s authors but also the affiliation of each author. Based on it, cooperation can be divided into inner-school cooperation, inter-school cooperation, and inter-university cooperation.Finally, we put forward three policy suggestions from the perspective of bettering scientific research environment. As follows: (1) Establish a good academic reputation mechanism. The establishment of an academic reputation mechanism is the foundation. Without academic reputation mechanism, the abolishing of the first author rule may condone academic misconduct such as "free rider". On September 1 in 2016, the Ministry of Education has promulgated “the Measures for Preventing and Handling Academic Misconduct in the University” in the form of departmental regulations, but it only serves as a warning and precaution in advance. It is also necessary to establish an independent academic integrity investigation institution that publishes the list of irregular scholars and improves the self-discipline of scientific researchers. In addition, academic journals should give a warning or reject their submissions to researchers who violate academic ethics. (2) Reform the scientific research evaluation rule with papers as the core. In order to eliminate the scientific research evaluation rule with the number of papers and highly cited papers as the core, the peer review mechanism mainly carried out by the third-party evaluation institution should be gradually established. Besides that, on the establishment of an evaluation system, comprehensive and classification evaluations are equally important. Good classification evaluation mechanism means that teachers working in teaching or scientific research can be evaluated separately. At the same time, researchers working in basic or applied research can also be evaluated separately. (3) Reform the signature rule. On the basis of (1) and (2) points, the signature mechanism should be gradually changed to be sorted by initials of surnames. From the subject evaluation to academic ability evaluation, the first author rule should be broken. Only in the way, more and more researchers can be encouraged to working in the high-level of co-authored researches.

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Intellectual property institutional distance and outward foreign direct investment——A case study of the countries along the Belt and Road

Yang Zhongmin, Yang Xiaohui, Wang Yu

2019, 40(5): 193-202.

Abstract ( 262 )

As the largest developing country, China has accelerated the implementation of the "One Belt and One Road" strategy to cope with the drastic changes in the international investment environment. The importance of intellectual property was highlighted at the One Belt and One Road high-level meeting on intellectual property. This paper discusses the relationship between intellectual property system distance and OFDI based on the consideration of domestic and international influencing factors of OFDI. This study analyzed based on the panel data between 49 developing countries from 1994 to 2014 and between China and 46 "One Belt and One Road" countries from 2003 to 2014.The stability of panel data should be tested first before the regression analysis of panel data. In this paper, LLC unit root test method is adopted to carry out the stationarity test. Before the panel model is estimated, Hausman and Kuersteiner (2008) test is required to determine whether the fixed-effect model or the random-effect model is adopted. The main research conclusions are as follows: first, the economic growth in developing countries, research and development investment, foreign investment level, currency appreciation and export levels for domestic enterprises has a promoting effect for foreign investment activities. The formation of enterprise ownership advantage in developing countries depends on both domestic economic development and external international economic situation. It is found that the influence of intellectual property system on investment in developing countries is approximately inverted u-shaped with the change of distance from negative to positive. When they invest in developing countries with a relatively close and positive distance to the intellectual property system, the impact of the intellectual property system on outward FDI is negative. This is because the better system of the host country may form an obstacle to the enterprises in the imperfect system. One of the purposes of some developing countries' foreign investment is to acquire advanced technologies from other countries. Although the intellectual property protection level of other developing countries is only slightly higher than that of their own countries, it may still become an obstacle for their own countries to acquire higher technologies from foreign countries. When it invests in developed countries whose intellectual property protection level is much higher than that of its home country, the huge intellectual property system distance becomes the barrier for it to enter the host country. When it invests in backward countries, the same poor intellectual property system increases the operating costs of enterprises.Second, China's investment in "One Belt and One Road" countries shows special rules in different regions such as southeast Asia, central Asia and west Asia. Economic growth, investment in R&D and the level of FDI are conducive to the investment enthusiasm of Chinese enterprises (especially state-owned enterprises). The impact of exchange rates on Chinese investment in "One Belt and One Road" countries varies from region to region. The effect of export on foreign investment is negative in southeast Asia and west Asia, but positive in other regions. This is related to the stage of China's export in the host country. The influence of China's intellectual property system distance on different regions of "One Belt and One Road" is positive, negative and insignificant, which mainly depends on the scale of technology transfer and the influence of other formal and informal systems in the host country. China's influence is positive in southeast Asia and central Asia, negative in South Asia and west Asia, but not significant in central and eastern Europe and the commonwealth of independent states. This is due to the investment in the fields of electric power and mining resources exploitation in southeast Asia and petroleum exploration and exploitation, transportation and communication construction, chemical industry and other fields in central Asia, all of which involve international technology transfer. The smaller intellectual property system distance promotes the technology transfer and transformation. As a formal system, the intellectual property system itself will be affected by factors such as the informal system and local political stability in the process of implementation. Armed conflicts, religious conflicts and terrorist attacks in west Asia and doubts and resistance of the people in South Asia will all have negative effects on the intellectual property system. On the whole, the scale of investment in central and eastern Europe and CIS is small, involving less transnational knowledge transfer, so the impact of intellectual property system distance is not significant. The results show that the improvement of China's intellectual property system plays a positive role in expanding its investment in "One Belt and One Road" countries.According to the research conclusions, the following policy implications can be drawn:first, developing countries should improve the quality of their economic development. We will continue to optimize the economic structure and accelerate the transformation of economic growth drivers, so as to strengthen the advantages of enterprise ownership. Give full play to the role of the private sector and encourage the participation of the domestic private sector in the wider economy through the public-private partnership (PPP) programme. Second, developing countries should optimize the way they invest in research and development. Most R&D investment in developing countries mainly relies on project funding. In reality, enterprises with a certain development and R&D foundation usually get the project funding in the end. We will make full use of the AIIB and the silk road fund to fund advanced technology research and development for projects that are in line with the "One Belt and One Road" strategy. Third, China is further opening up to the outside world. Comprehensive promotion of free trade zone model to reduce export costs; The negative list will be further reduced to speed up the internationalization of RMB and the marketization of exchange rate.Fourth, China has established a sub-industry investment directory. It is easier to succeed investing in areas where the intellectual property regime is similar or to weaker our country. We should improve the protection of intellectual property rights system, enlarge the scope of intellectual property infringement, to expand the scope countries in which our country can successfully invest.

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Group patent:An institutional arrangement for transformation of patents into standards

Zhang Yong, Zhao Jiannan, Li Qingqing

2019, 40(5): 203-211.

Abstract ( 229 )

The rationality of the patent system is directly related to the effectiveness of patent transformation, and it also affects the quality of industrial economic growth. A technological transformation, which is the conversion of patent to technological standards, is a new strategic conversion. In this path of design, it has the conflict of patent abuse, which is caused by the non-reasonable patent property right and the asymmetry of patent information. Although companies adopted the patent alliance strategy to deal with the conflict, there are many problems about the strategy, such as lack of clarity in the definition of property rights, reduced possibility of market innovation, lack of long-term stability mechanisms, possibility of new obstacles to technological progress, and lack of compatibility with group standard reforms. In general, it does not effectively promote the transformation of patents into technical standards. Because it cannot solve the act of private right of patent rights. Therefore, establishing a group patent system in which enterprises jointly own patent property rights, will break through internal monopolies and break through restriction that patents must be held by patent associations. It will combine relevant institutions in the upper and lower reaches of the industry and promote the flow of information among enterprises through joint property rights. It will form a new situation of patent sharing, patent joint research and development, and jointly promote the transformation of patents into technical standards. By building the model of patent cooperation by using the economic theories, which is the method to determine the necessity and feasibility of development of enterprise patents and distribution of the profits. The paper found it is helpful to increase the profit and public benefit of individual enterprises through the standard of the group for incorporation of patent rights, and it is easier to reduce the asymmetric loss of patent value information of standard users. At the same time, the paper found different companies have clearly the effects of joint research and development, common technical standards and product quality improvement after implementation of group common patents, because it reduces the cost of internal consumption. Therefore, the market increment has been generated, and public welfare has been increased through group patent co-ownership, which has reduced the public welfare losses caused by monopolies caused by patent pools.However, because of the quasi-public product attributes of group patents, if there is no binding cooperation agreement within the group, itwill be easy to cause disputes within the group that owns group patents due to the externality, which eventually leads to the inability of group patents to exist. Therefore, group patents should have the feasibility of establishing reasonable agreements to reduce externality. At the same time, it is a reasonable cooperation mechanism in itself by writing group patents into group standards. It helps to promote the production of products that match the value of patents by group members and avoids waste of patent value. Thus the experiment of this patent system has discovered a new path for patent results in China. Moreover, it supports the foundation of patent system, which improves the quality level for the development of innovation-driven economy.

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Patent fragmentation, tragedy of anti-commons and government governance

Li Fang, Zhang Sheng, Huang Huan

2019, 40(5): 212-221.

Abstract ( 289 )

Patent fragmentation, that is patent resources are owned by decentralized innovators, may lead to the tragedy of anti-commons in the patent market. In the field of high technology or emerging industries, the tragedy of anti-commons in the patent market means the failure of the transformation of major scientific and technological achievements or fail in the development of emerging industries, which seriously affect the public interests of the state and society. Therefore, under the background of patent fragmentation, patent market governance plays a more and more prominent role in the transformation of patent achievements and the innovative development of industry. Patent market failure is the core problem of scientific and technological governance research. Unlike the patent jungle, patent fragmentation emphasizes the dispersion of subjects of patents related to product technology from the perspective of achievement transformation, which leads to inadequate utilization of patents, that is, the tragedy of anti-commons in the patent market. Existing studies have recognized the tragedy of anti-commons in the patent market, and proposed governance mechanisms or measures from the market perspective, but neglected the government governance research on patent market failure caused by patent fragmentation.Construct a game model between multiple patentees and producers, and analyze the equilibrium of patent market. It is found that when considering transaction costs and patent structure, producers will choose tort production or non-production, and the patent market will fail. It means in the situation of patent fragmentation, even if all patentees are willing to license, the increasing frequency and cost of patent licensing transactions lead to the overburden of transaction costs in the patent market, which makes the patentee's individual licensing and patent pool licensing both in a dilemma, market mechanisms such as cross licensing and patent pool will fail. Then, there has been a tragedy of anti-commons in the patent market.Licensing in the patent market will affect the product market, and the failure of the patent market will lead to the shrinkage of the product market. At this time, government intervention is needed. Construct the government governance model of patent market failure. The core goal of government governance is to stabilize the patent market and develop the product market. The key of government governance is to reduce the transaction cost of patent licensing.Taking American aviation industry patent market governance case as an example, through case study, the tragedy of anti-commons in the patent market under the situation of patent fragmentation and its government governance mechanism are studied. The research has the following findings: Firstly, high transaction costs make it difficult to realize cross licensing and patent pool in the aviation patent market, and failure in the aviation patent market seriously restricts the development of the American aviation industry market. The fragmentation of patent resources leads to the failure of patent market, which not only obscures the contribution of patent itself to technological innovation, but also has a negative impact on technological progress and innovation development of the whole industry. Secondly, the establishment of patent pool will reduce the transaction cost of patent market. The establishment of American aviation patent pool effectively reduces the transaction frequency and search cost of manufacturers. Whether a manufacturer chooses to join or not to join the patent pool, it reduces the contracting cost of the manufacturer. Thirdly, compulsory cross licensing can reduce the negotiation cost of patent pool establishment. The government can compel the cross licensing of industrial core technology patents by canceling and expropriating patents, thus achieving the successful establishment of patent pool. This shows that compulsory licensing, as a means of government regulation of the patent market, can effectively maintain the normal order of competition in the patent market, break down the barriers of malicious monopoly in the patent market, and realize the effective protection of patent innovation at the whole industrial level, not just at the individual level. Fourthly, price control can control the cost of patent acquisition. By controlling the price of patent licensing, the government maintains the patent licensing fees at a level acceptable to all parties in the patent market, eliminates the negative impact of malicious bidding by patent owners on producers and the prices of products, and ensures the effective operation of the patent pool. Consequently, through compulsory cross licensing and price control, the government guides patentees and producers to form patent pools together, which can effectively reduce transaction costs of patent market, stabilizes patent market and develops product market, and promotes patent licensing and industrial development.Based on the game model between multiple patentees and producers and the case study of American aviation industry patent market governance case, analyzes the emergence of the tragedy of anti-commons in the patent market and its government governance mechanism under the situation of patent fragmentation. The main findings are as follows: Firstly, patent fragmentation will increase the number of licensing transaction, and enlarge the cost of licensing transaction, lead to the failure of patent market. Patent market mechanisms such as patent pool will be failure, and then the tragedy of anti-commons with insufficient patent utilization appears. Secondly, By means of compulsory cross licensing and price control, the government promotes the establishment of patent pool, reduces the transaction cost of patent licensing, reduces the opportunistic behavior of patent owners, effectively governs the failure of patent market and avoids the tragedy of anti-commons in the patent market.The government governance mechanism of patent market failure has some enlightenment for the transformation of scientific and technological achievements and the development of new industries in China. At present, under the background of China's technological innovation institution, institutional factors have aggravated the degree of fragmentation of patent resources, technology commercialization faces greater transaction costs, which restricts the development of industry. By breaking the restriction of institution and mechanism and setting up patent pools around core products and industrial core technologies, the government can greatly reduce the transaction costs of all parties to patent licensing, effectively alleviate the difficulty of science and technology achievements transformation caused by of patent fragmentation, and promote technology licensing and technology commercialization.

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A research on the organization learning of technological small and micro-sized enterprises:The construction of systems and the antecedent role of strategic orientation

Xue Jie

2019, 40(5): 222-232.

Abstract ( 199 )

Researchers have increasingly noted that organizational learning may be crucial for resolving the dilemmas resulting from increasingly dynamic market environment. However, previous research on enterprise organizational learning remains limited, especially in the context of emerging market such as China. Specifically, there are several questions need to be further investigated. First, prior literature on the exact construct of organizational learning has not reached a consensus, though most researchers in this field consider organizational learning as consisting of multiple, distinct sub-processes. Second, albeit extant studies increase our understanding of the strategic antecedents that affect organizational learning, issues on how exactly different strategic orientations influence organizational learning is still under-explored. Third, considering the positive outcomes of organizational learning, scholarly interest in identifying the effects of organizational learning has greatly increased over the past couple of decades. Nevertheless, the mediation effects of organizational learning on the connections between different enterprise strategic orientations and competitive capabilities are rather unclear. Based on previous research published on top peer-reviewed management journals, we referred to the models presented in these articles to identify six sub-processes that collectively appear to capture the entire learning cycle. Specifically, many scholars agree that organizational learning begins with some form of knowledge acquisition. The knowledge is then distributed across the enterprise. Knowledge interpretation and knowledge integration are typically followed in a sequence. The process concludes as knowledge is stored in organizational memory and subsequently gets exploited. We note that although the six sub-processes constitute an integrated organizational learning process, exceptions may occur given the research context is specialized in the technological micro- and small-sized enterprises in China. Accordingly, this paper aims to describe each of the aforementioned six sub-processes in more detail, and at the same time briefly discuss some key interrelationships and feedback loops among these different sub-processes. Moreover, regarding strategic orientations that influence organizational learning, several studies in this field identify three prominent strategic orientations, including technological orientation, market orientation and resource orientation, as critical determinants of organizational learning as a whole, though the empirical evidence is still missing.In summary, this study primarily focuses on the following three issues, including identifying the construct of organization learning of technological micro- and small-sized enterprises, exploring the influence of different strategic orientations (e.g., technological orientation, market orientation and resource orientation) on organization learning, and revealing the mediation effects of organization learning on the relationship between strategic orientations and competitive capabilities of technological micro- and small-sized enterprises.Based onthe data collected from 364 technological micro- and small-sized enterprises in Foshan, Guangdong, China, we firstly conducted a higher-order factor analysis. The results indicate the organization learning of technological micro- and small-sized enterprises merely including knowledge acquisition, knowledge interpretation, knowledge integration and knowledge exploitation, which is different from a general framework of organization learning. Secondly, the results from path analysis indicate that both technological and market orientation have a significantly positive effect on organization learning. Finally, organization learning not only have a positively direct influence on enterprise competitive capabilities, but also fully mediate the influence of market orientation on competitive capabilities and partially mediate the influence of technological orientation on competitive capabilities.This study advances existing literature on organizational learning and micro- and small-sized enterprise management in at least four important ways. First, this study contributes to the literature on technological micro- and small-sized enterprise organizational learning by offering a detailed framework of the relationship between key strategic orientations to organizational learning and the individual sub-processes of learning. Achieving this kind of fine-grained framework is vital to understanding how the strategic orientations exert their influence and, therefore, why enterprises may differ in their learning and in their final outcomes such as competitive capabilities.Second, the empirical results shows that the construct of organization learning of technological micro- and small -sized enterprises is more concise and simple than the general framework resulted from the research on big companies or enterprises from Western counties. Hence, this research identifies the unique characteristics of organizational learning of technological micro- and small-sized enterprises and furthers our understandings on organizational learning of enterprises with different sizes and from different countries.Third, this study further contributes to the effects of organizational learning on competitive capability of technological micro- and small-sized enterprises. It also echoes the researchers’ call for the examination of the organizational learning from the firm-level capability perspective.Finally, this article theorizes and tests the role that organizational learning serves as a firm-specific mediating mechanism between the three strategic orientations and competitive capability. By confirming the effects of strategic orientations and the mediation effects of organizational learning, this study provides new insights into how organizational learning leverages the benefits of different strategic orientations in order to enhance micro- and small-sized enterprise competitive capability.Additionally, the findings of this study have important implications for managerial practices of micro- and small -sized enterprise in China. First, the research results can help managers of micro- and small -sized enterprise recognize particular sub-processes of organizational learning that need improvement, identify strategic antecedents that have a direct impact on organizational learning, and deploy certain strategic orientation change strategies to stimulate their organizations’ learning activities. Second, the findings indicate that managers of micro- and small -sized enterprise must be sensitive to the effects of organizational learning that may be enhanced under certain strategic orientations. Finally, these results also enable managers of micro- and small -sized enterprise to take advantage of organizational learning during the transferring of technological and market orientations to competitive capability.

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Impact of top executives’ political connections on innovation performance——The nonlinear mediation effect of the board’s governance behavior#br#

Liu Meifen

2019, 40(5): 233-243.

Abstract ( 291 )

Since the reform and opening up, the development of private economy has been rapid. How to maintain the momentum of growth is the key problem that private enterprises need to solve urgently. It is the core competitiveness of private enterprises to have advanced innovation technology and efficient innovation efficiency. If innovation is integrated into the production activities of enterprises, it will promote economic growth; on the contrary, if it is integrated into non-production activities such as rent-seeking, it will restrict economic growth. Therefore, innovation is a necessary condition for the enterprise's development, and innovation performance is an effective criterion to measure an enterprise's innovation level. However, innovation performance is constrained by many institutional environmental factors, such as legal environment, preferential policies of the government, financial system and so on.Whether or not enterprises have political connections may affect their innovation performance. Private enterprises with political connections can enjoy preferential policies of the government and obtain financial subsidies. Under the condition of financing constraints, it is easier to obtain the funds needed for innovation through external financing. Scholars have verified the mechanism of the relationship between executive' political connections and innovation performance, but the results are different. Some scholars believe that executive' political connections have a positive impact on enterprise R&D and can positively promote the independent innovation of enterprises; some scholars have found that executive' political connections have a significant negative impact on technological innovation performance. Scholars have inconsistent conclusions about the relationship between executive' political connections and innovation performance. The main reason is that the relationship between executive' political connections and innovation performance is directly established in the process of analysis, which leads to a larger logical jump.Based on the SCP theory of industrial organization, the characteristics of executives such as executive' political connections do not simply directly affect innovation performance, but by means of mediating effects. This paper introduces the mediating effect of the governance behavior of the board of directors when analyzing the influence ofexecutive' political connections on innovation performance, explains the formation mechanism of innovation performance from the level of the governance behavior of the board of directors, and constructs the influence path model of " executive' political connections →the governance behavior of the board of directors →innovation performance ". At the same time, the relationship between the governance behavior of the board of directors and innovation performance are not a simple linear relationship. However, there may be a non-linear relationship. This paper uses the non-linear test method to verify the intermediary role of the governance behavior of the board of directors, so as to expand the existing private enterprise innovation research.This paper puts forward three research hypotheses:executive' political connections have a non-linear impact on the governance behavior of the board of directors, that is, logarithmic or inverted U-shaped; there is a non-linear relationship between the governance behavior of the board of directors and innovation performance, that is, logarithmic or inverted U-shaped; and between executive' political connections and innovation performance, the governance behavior of the board of directors plays a non-linear intermediary effect. In this paper, 5128 observation points of non-financial private listed companies from Shenzhen Stock Exchange from 2009 to 2013 are selected as initial samples. In order to improve the representativeness of samples, according to the usual practice, 3065 valid observations were obtained by eliminating ST or ST*, the existence of abnormal values, the serious lack of data, and the rapid change of the main industry (backdoor listing) soon after listing. Financial data, governance indicators, industry classification and other information come from Xenophon database. The information of R&D investment and political contacts of senior managers is obtained by hand. The author collects the annual reports of private listed companies from the website of Shenzhen Stock Exchange to find the data of R&D investment; downloads the executive resume from the CSMAR database; if the data is missing, then searches through Sina Finance, Trend Information, the company's official website and Baidu to determine whether there are political links according to the executive resume.The study finds that executive' political connections first affect the governance behavior of the board of directors, and then affect innovation performance. The mechanism model is expanded from simple "executive' political connections→innovation performance " to" executive' political connections →the governance behavior of the board of directors →innovation performance ". Thus, the formation mechanism of executive' political connections affecting innovation performance is explained more deeply and scientifically. At present, private enterprises are often constrained by lack of funds and do not have enough funds to innovate. In this situation, executive' political linkages can improve innovation performance by means of the governance behavior of the board of directors, which can play the role of "support hand" to facilitate corporate financing and reduce financing constraints. However, the cost of establishing political linkages is high. The role of the "hand of plunder" is prominent, the burden of enterprises is increased, the funds used for innovation or other investments are greatly reduced, and executive political linkages will have a negative impact on innovation performance through the governance behavior of the board of directors. Therefore, executive' political connections have a non-linear impact on the governance behavior of the board of directors, i.e. inverted U-shaped; there is a non-linear relationship between the governance behavior of the board of directors and innovation performance, i.e. logarithmic relationship; and between executive' political connections and innovation performance, the governance behavior of the board of directors plays a non-linear intermediary effect.The conclusion of this paper has some enlightenment for perfecting corporate governance theory and application practice: firstly, in private listed companies, executive's political connection affects innovation performance through the governance behavior of the board of directors. This is an imperfect performance of the internal governance structure of the company, resulting in low efficiency of governance. Therefore, in order to sustain the development of private listed companies, we should improve the governance system, supervise and control the executives in real time, strengthen internal governance, use funds appropriately and reasonably, optimize the allocation of resources, and actively participate in innovative activities. secondly, the government should formulate regulatory measures according to the actual situation of private listed companies. In the long term, the government functional departments should simplify administrative functions, optimize the investment environment of enterprises, better serve the development of enterprises, allow market participants to participate in market competition freely and fairly, and ensure the healthy development of private listed companies.

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A research on the relationship between board social capital and CEO power on R&D investment:An evidence from the GEM Listed Corporation

Wang Nan1,2, Huang Jing1, Wang Bin1

2019, 40(5): 244-253.

Abstract ( 336 )

As the main bridge to connect enterprise with external environment, board of directors provide convenient access for enterprise to obtain key information and crucial resources. Therefore, board of directors play a key role in selecting, formulating and implementing the corporation strategy decisions. Resource dependence theory believes that board of directors’ social capital leads the board managing the enterprises, offering them advice and affects their suggestions and resources. The data of GEM listed companies during 2010 to 2014 was collected as a sample for empirical analysis. This paper investigates the relationship between R&D investment and board social capital which is divided into political connection and business connection.Although directors who possess social capital can provide resources needed for R&D, they also need motivation to perform these tasks effectively. Except for the boards, the CEO is also responsible to allocate the resources and make the strategic decisions. The CEO who owns the high power has the ability influencing the board’s decision making. Besides, the interaction between the CEO and board could affect the quality of the decision making. This article extends view of board dependence, and discusses CEO power's moderate influence between board social capital and R&D investmentWe found that: (1) There is a significant positive correlation between board business connection and R & D investment. (2) The board political connection is significantly negative on R&D investment; (3) With the spirit of the housekeeper, the high power of CEO is significantly negative moderate between board political connection and R&D investment.This paper’s main theoretical contributions indicated in the following areas: firstly, the existing research about impact of the board of directors on R&D investment has been expanded. The past researches always focused on the characteristics variable like board composition and board size, neglecting the vital role of board’s social capital. Using resource dependence theory to explain how the board affects R&D investment through the guidance and resources provided by the directors, exploits a new perspective on the relationship between board and R&D. Secondly, establishing a relationship between the board’s social capital, CEO power and R&D investment. It is suggested that when board social capital play resource providing role for R&D investment, the CEO power’s potential moderating effect should be considered. Empirical research about the impact of CEO power on board’s resources providing fills the gap between the board social capital and R&D investment. It has deepened the understanding of the relationship between the two and also filled a void in the literature on the relationship among the three.Thirdly, in response to previous research on how the CEO-Board relationship affects the board's resource-dependent role and strategic decision-making, we propose that board of directors need additional motivation to provide resources and clarify an important regulatory variable—CEO power. This is consistent with discussion about the deficiencies of previous resource-dependent theories, which neglected the importance of motivation in terms of board capital and resource allocation relationships. By demonstrating how CEO power influences the resource-dependent role of directors in R&D investment decisions, it not only supplements the literature on resource dependence theory, but also explores an important topic in the field of corporate governance research—the black box of the relationship between CEOs and directors, and also complements to the rising but still immature theory about how the CEO-board interaction impacts organizational achievement.Fourthly, the former studies about the agency theory mostly uses the directly obtained substitution variable like the ratio of internal board members to external board members, and reports a mixing result. Basing on different subjects enterprises establishing external relations with, we divides the board social capital into detailed dimensions, enriching the connotation and extension of the board social capital. In depth study about the impact of different relationships social capital is formed by, and it supplements the previous research on the overall impact of board’s social capital. This study provides suggestions and support for making full use of board social capital and CEO housekeeping spirit, and forming strategic alliances between board and CEO.

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Official visits and corporate employee

Bai Yunxia, Wang Yanping

2019, 40(5): 254-263.

Abstract ( 183 )

The relationship between government and enterprises has always been an important issue in academic research. In transition economies, how the government transforms its functions and how to build a new type of government-enterprise relationship have received wide attention. Since the financial crisis in 2008, most countries have fallen into recession. In order to boost the economy, governments of many countries have introduced various measures to strengthen the regulation of the market economy. Keynesianism and state interventionism have re-emerged. As a result, the academic community has implemented many new researches about the relationship between government and market. The boundary between government's macroeconomic regulation and the free market has once again become a research hot spot. Under such circumstance, it is more practical to study the relationship between government and enterprises. There are many theoretical references on political connections which represent the relationship between government and enterprises. However, due to the fact that the relationship between government and enterprises is difficult to measure, there are few researches on this problem. And most political connections researches examine how companies affect government policy making or resource allocation through executives with government background. These researches are from the perspective of enterprises. Since current government officials are not allowed to serve in the enterprise, the executives who measure political connections in previous researches are actually retired government officials. But actual controllers of resources are current government officials. Accordingly, it can be speculated that the reliability of the conclusions of such documents depends on the impact that retired or outgoing government officials can exert on the current government. With the advancement of political and economic reforms, the mobility of government officialsor local governors’ turnover has increased, and rotations across places have become common phenomena. The occupational risks of government officials have also increased. The news about officials being downgraded, dismissed and even expelled have been reported frequently from time to time. In such cases, the impact of retired or outgoing government officials on the current government department is yet to be verified. Fortunately, official visits with Chinese characteristics have provided us with a new perspective to study the political connections from government side. At present, there are a few papers studying Chinese official visits. They still proceed on enterprise side to investigate the benefits of official visits to enterprises from the perspectives of government subsidies, corporate alliances and corporate innovations. In this paper we start from the government side to study the reason that Chinese government officials visit companies frequently, and whether official visits will bring burdens to companies.Different from the papers which discuss how to seek protection of government by political connections from the angle of the companies, this paper studies how to achieve the social goals by official visits from the angle of government. Based on the comparison of government official visits from all over the world, this paper studies how Chinese government officials achieve political employment goals by visiting enterprises. The contributions of this paper are mainly reflected in the following five points. First, previous researches only pay attention to domestic official visits, and has not yet carried out comparative analysis from international level, and the description of Chinese official inspection is relatively simple. Through the official visits statistics of Fortune 500 global corporations, This paper presents a detailed description from the aspects of types, reasons and annual changes of official visits. By comparing official visits from all over the world, it is found that government officials in developed market economies rarely visit enterprises, but Chinese officials visit enterprises frequently, forming “Chinese Characteristics” visit phenomenon. From the institutional level, an in-depth analysis is presented why official visits have Chinese characteristics, that is, they shoulder heavy employment goals. Second, this paper uses employment goals as an entry point to examine the motivation of official visits from the perspective of the government. Measuring the labor absorption capacity by the employment elasticity coefficient, it is found that government officials tend to choose enterprises with strong labor absorption capacity as the target of visit. In addition, enterprises with large number of employees are also the targets of government officials, even if the potential of such enterprises to increase labor is limited. However, stabilizing the size of its existing staff, reducing or even eliminating layoffs, will also play a vital role in stabilizing employment in the region. Third, companies that arevisited by officials have the responsibility to help government achieve its social goals in labor employment, which is manifested by the recruitment of a large number of low-skilled employees. The rapid increase in the number of low-skilled employees exceeds the need for business expansion, resulting in employee redundancy. Fourth, when government officials visit state-owned enterprises, state-owned enterprise executives are more motivated to complete this political task in order to obtain political promotion. Compared with non-state-owned enterprises, this positive correlation between official visits and employee scale is more prominent in state-owned enterprises. Fifth, in areas with higher employment goals, government officials are subject to greater employment pressure, and the employee effect and redundancy effect of official visits are more significant.In conclusion, developed market economies officials rarely visit enterprises, but Chinese officials visit enterprises frequently, forming “Chinese Characteristics” visit phenomenon. As to employment issue, the empirical findings show that the officials are inclined to visit the corporations which can absorb more employees. Official visits can increase the number of employees, especially for employees with college degree or below, thus incurring redundant employee. This relation is much stronger in state-owned enterprises and provinces with high employment goals. The results of this paper show that while government officials set macroeconomic goals such as increasing employment rates, they must also consider the labor allocation efficiency of enterprises in order to better develop China's labor market.

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Peer evaluation and knowledge sharing among R&D personnel：The moderating effect of group attention

Cai Liling, Bao Gongmin

2019, 40(5): 264-274.

Abstract ( 181 )

R&D personnel are the core force of knowledge creation and technological innovation in an organization. In order to promote the organization’s innovation and maintain its sustainable development, how to motivate R&D personnel to share their knowledge effectively has become an important issue of common concern in the field of industrial practice and academic research. Performance appraisal is an important tool for manager to assess, motivate and control the knowledge sharing behavior of employees. Traditional performance appraisal mainly relies on the administrative management under the leadership of superior authorities or teams. With the wide application of cross-departmental cooperation, autonomous team and virtual team in the process of technical study and knowledge sharing, there is an urgent need to rely on peer evaluation of internal group to improve management efficiency. Peer evaluation is the thinking or reflection of employees on their colleagues’ work. Peer evaluation exists in the real and virtual communication environment. R&D team or group will inevitably be affected by their colleagues’ evaluation in the process of face-to-face evaluation, work feedback, information sharing, comments on virtual community and the other types of organizational daily activities. However, few studies directly explore the relationship between peer evaluation and knowledge sharing, especially among R&D groups within organization. In addition, Chinese culture has the characteristics of high group orientation and strong social concern. Does high-intensity group concern result in overload of cognitive resources of R&D personnel, which leads to the change of their preference or exclusion on specific types of peer evaluation, and then have a special impact on knowledge sharing? Starting from the phenomenon of Chinese culture, takingR&D personnel as the research samples, this paper explored the relationship between peer evaluation and employees knowledge sharing. The research process was as follows. Firstly, theoretical framework and research hypothesis were constructed through integrating performance evaluation theory, motivation theory, social exchange theory and social anxiety theory together. Secondly, visited and learned about R&D Department within different companies, 12 R&D personnel were selected for interviews, and the types of peer evaluation were excavated and refined to form the initial questionnaire by content analysis. Then, carried out exploratory factor analysis and reliability analysis through 85 small sample tests, revised and formed the final measurement terms. Thirdly, a large sample of empirical research was conducted and 535 valid questionnaires were collected, through reliability and validity analysis, common method deviation analysis and regression analysis, tested the influence mechanism of different types of peer evaluation on employees knowledge sharing.The results showed that: (1) The conceptual structure of four dimensions with two variables had been proposed and tested, which can be divided into positive evaluation and negative evaluation from the perspective of nature, and be divided into process-oriented evaluation and outcome oriented evaluation from the perspective of orientation. (2) The positive impact of peer positive evaluation on R&D employee’s knowledge sharing and the negative impact of peer negative evaluation on it had been verified. (3) Both outcome-oriented evaluation and process-oriented evaluation can promote employees knowledge sharing, process-oriented evaluation can promote explicit knowledge sharing more significantly, while outcome-oriented evaluation can promote tacit knowledge sharing more significantly. That was to say, process-oriented evaluation which was relied on the attitude, method and procedure of technological research process as evaluation criteria, can encourage explicit knowledge sharing more effectively, since it was easy to be expressed and measured. However, the unique experience knowledge of R&D employee was difficult to monitor and measure in the process of knowledge sharing, so tacit knowledge will be more effective to be motivated through outcome-oriented evaluation. (4) Outcome-oriented evaluation weakened the relationship between the relationship of positive evaluation and explicit knowledge sharing. Process-oriented evaluation strengthened the relationship between the relationship of negative evaluation and tacit knowledge sharing, while outcome-oriented evaluation play a weakening role between the relationship of negative evaluation and tacit knowledge sharing. (5) Group attention had produced important boundary effects. When group attention was higher, the promoting effect of outcome-oriented evaluation on explicit knowledge sharing was stronger, and the promoting effect of outcome-oriented evaluation on tacit knowledge sharing became insignificant.The conclusions of this study can provide important management inspiration for organizations to make better use of peer evaluation tools and promote the efficiency of knowledge sharing. Firstly, the organizations should abandon the single or one-size-fits-all evaluation mode of thinking, take differentiated measures to monitor the advantageous side and flip side of emotional components on peer evaluation. Timely controlled the downsides of negative evaluation, and avoid them turning into bamboo telegraph or gossip behind employees’ back, so as to create a disharmonious atmosphere of "literati are light on each other" between knowledge workers andR&D personnel. Secondly, according to the characteristics of knowledge, organizations should make use of the rational components of peer evaluation, and seriously consider the practical effect of evaluation orientation, so as to promote the healthy development of organizational knowledge management mechanism. For example, when R&D personnel are sharing explicit knowledge, the organization can guide R&D personnel to adopt the final work performance or goal completion as evaluation criteria. When R&D personnel were sharing their researching experience or inspiration, the organization should advocate R&D personnel to adopt process elements, such as task methods and work procedures, as evaluation criteria. Thirdly, the organization should create a good atmosphere of public opinion in order to enhance the effectiveness of peer evaluation. On the one hand, for explicit knowledge sharing, organizations can advocate open outcome-oriented evaluation among employees. On the other hand, the organization should monitor the evaluation environment of colleagues, especially when R&D personnel share their researching experience in the face-to-face situations, their mangers should help dilute outcome-oriented evaluation thinking habits in teams or departments. It is undeniable that China is a country with group-oriented cultural characteristics, and people tended to pay attention to each other. Therefore, organizations should guide R&D personnel to reduce comparisons on their research performance in public. By creating a good atmosphere of organizational public opinion, it can provide a beneficial organizational environment for R&D employee to share their personal valuable experience and knowledge.

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President tenure and university performance: An empirical research based on the panel data from 1999 to 2018

Liu Chang, Chen Shouming

2019, 40(5): 275-281.

Abstract ( 214 )

It is generally believed that university presidents play a key role in the development of universities, and the cognitive and emotional characteristics of university presidents will influence the decision-making and performance of universities. This paper makes a investigation on the relationship between the tenure of university presidents and university performance in the past 20 years in China. The theoretical significance of this study is to test the relationship between the characteristics of the tenure of university presidents and university performance in of China, enriching the empirical study of Upper Echelons Theory on university-related issues. The practical significance of this study is that extending the tenure of university presidents is conducive to improve university performance. Based on the problems raised in this paper, it is hoped that the research results of this paper can promote the relevant research in the academic circles and provide a reference for the national education management department to formulate the term system of principals.In this paper, panel data are used for regression analysis. Inthe past researches, the cross-section research and the time series research method are mostly used. Compared with traditional cross section data or time series data, panel data has many advantages, which can provide a large amount of data for research, increase the degree of freedom of data, control the heterogeneity of different individuals, avoid multiple collinear problems more easily, and is more suitable for dynamic adjustment process. Therefore, the validity of econometric model estimation is improved. In this paper, the first-class universities determined by the Ministry of Education in 2017 are selected as research samples. Because the ranking of the Minzu University of China and Xinjiang University fluctuates greatly, it is treated as abnormal values. National University of Defense Technology is not included in the research scope because it belongs to military system. The total number of observations in this study is 39. Taking into account the ranking changes in each year from 1999 to 2018, after excluding missing data and abnormal values, the final number of observations is 663. The characteristics of university presidents in this paper include gender, age, overseas education background, overseas work experience, tenure, academician, internal promotion and alumni. The features of past and current university presidents are collected from the websites of universities and colleges, and the missing data are partly collected from the websites of Baidu Encyclopedia and Ministry of Education. The change of university performance manifested as change in ranking, which refers to the fluctuation when the university president takes office and leaves the university, which is derived from Wu Shulian comprehensive university ranking from 1999 to 2018. Because the performance of the university has lag effect compared with the president tenure, the decisions of university presidents generally can not produce significant effect in the current year. Therefore, in order to reflect causality, we choose the following year as the research object, and the performance of the following year will be published in the form of ranking at the beginning of the following year. Therefore, the independent variable will be measured by the t year of the university president in office, and the dependent variable will be measured by the university ranking published in t+2 year. The statistical results show that, among the presidents of first-class universities, those who have studied abroad accounted for 42.4%, those who have overseas work experience accounted for 33.2%, academicians accounted for 32.4%, and internal promotions accounted for 57%, the proportion of alumni accounts for 54.3%, the average tenure is 4.293 years. The following conclusions can be drawn from the correlation coefficient matrix: There is a significant positive correlation between the tenure of university presidents and university performance. The overseas work experience has passed the coefficient test under the 0.01 confidence level. Academician has passed the coefficient test under the 0.05 confidence level. Merge has passed the coefficient test under the 0.001 confidence level. It is shown that these three control variables can explain the university performance better, and adding these variables can help to analyze the relationship between the background characteristics of university presidents and university performance more accurately. But gender, age, overseas background, internal promotion, and alumni are less explanatory. The relationship between the tenure of the university president and university performance has passed the significant test under 0.05 confidence level, which indicates that the longer the tenure of the university president, the better the performance of university. The squared coefficient of thethe tenure of the university president is negative but not significant, and does not pass the significance test. We believe that the reason why the square of tenure does not pass the significance test is that, the term of office of university presidents in our country is generally short and has not reached the value for the highest highest performance level.First, the longer the tenure of the university president, the better the performance of university. Second, the square of tenure fails to pass the significance test, mainly because compared with foreign countries, the tenure of of university presidents in our country is generally shorter and has not reached the value for the highest highest performance level. This paper holds that, based on the conclusion of the research, the term of the university president should be extended properly for the long term development of the first class university in China.

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Appraisal methods and application of intangible assets for high-tech firms

Zhou Xingjuan

2019, 40(5): 282-288.

Abstract ( 357 )

The value of the enterprise, in addition to the tangible assets, also includes the operational benefits of intangible assets, such as the acquisition of goodwill, intellectual property or the creation of customer value, which can increase the added value of the enterprise. Intangible assets are one of the most important assets of an enterprise.In the era of knowledge economy, intangible asset management is not only a matter of organizational value, but also a key factor in business growth.High-tech enterprises have the characteristics of continuous innovation, high added value, and high concentration of knowledge. They belong to a new form of industry that is highly dependent on intangible assets. For high-tech industries and companies, intangible assets are more important to the creation of corporatevalue.When high-tech companies want to further use intangible assets as a tool for competition, they must face the problem of how to evaluate intangible assets.The traditional accounting methods have inherent limitations and shortcomings in the expression of the value of intangible assets, and cannot reasonably reflect the value of intangibleassets.Based on the characteristics of high-tech enterprises, this paper comprehensively combs and systematically summarizes the methods and application conditions of various intangible assets evaluation, and makes a comparative study on related methods, and discusses how to evaluate intangible assets in order to carry out reasonable capital valuation.Common methods of evaluating intangible assets can be divided into cost method, income method and market method. Each method has its applicability and depends on the professional judgment of the evaluator.(1)Cost method: Based on the principle of substitution, it is assumed that the investor will not increase the cost of initially constructing the intangible asset and invest more money to rebuild another new intangible asset. Therefore, under this method, the intangible asset has more value. The replacement cost is capped. The types of intangible assets that often use this method are: information systems, marketing channels, and human resources.(2)Income method: Estimate the economic benefits that may be generated in the future of the evaluated target, and discount it to the present value of the evaluation date as the fair price. The types of intangible assets that often use this method are: patents, technology, brands, copyrights, customer relationships, software products, etc.(3)Market method: The quoted price of an asset that is similar or comparable to the target being evaluated in the public market is a reference to the fair price. Types of intangible assets that often use this method: information systems, patents, technology, software products, etc.Currently, there are five commonly used methods for evaluating intangible assets of high-tech enterprises: Market/Book value ratio method（MV/BV）： The calculation of the value of intangible assets is the ratio between the market value of the company′s stock price and the book value.When the ratio is greater than 1, it indicates the existence of the value of intangible assets，and the greater the ratio, the higher the value of intangible assets。Tobin Q method：The method was first proposed by Nobel economist Tobin (1950) to predict corporate decisions beyond independent macroeconomic factors.It is defined as ratio of the market value of the company and the replacement value of the company′s assets (Market Value/Replacement costs). If the Q value is greater than 1, it means that the company can purchase more similar assets.Since the calculation of the original Tobin Q is too complicated, Chung & Stephen (1994) proposed a more convenient alternative, Approximate Tobin Q：(MVE+PS+DEBT)/Total Assets. The empirical results show that this alternative method can explain the original Tobin Q variation of 96.6%.Calculated Intangible Value method (CIV)：This is a method developed by the NCI Research Center, a subsidiary of Northwestern University′s Kellogg School of Business, to assess the value of intangible assets.CIV = (1 - tax rate) * excess compensation / discount rate，represents a company that is used to win the industry′s ability to own companies with similar tangible assets. As CIV rises, it is increasingly capable of producing more cash in the future on behalf of a business unit or department.Value Added Intellectual Capital method (VAICTM): It is a tool that provides analysis of managers, shareholders, or other stakeholders to test the efficiency with which companies use their resources to create added value.As proposed by Pulic (2000), the value and efficiency of intangible assets are calculated based on input capital, human capital, and structural capital.VAICTM = Structural Capital Efficiency Index + Human Capital Efficiency Index + Input Capital Efficiency Index.Economic Value Added method（EVA）：EVA is not only a measure of performance, but also a residual income. If a reasonable investment compensation is to be obtained, the amount must be large enough to cover the risk assumed, and the necessary compensation for the risk refers to the capital cost of the debt and equity (Weighted average cost of capital, WACC). What is important is that it converts accounting information into economic reality. When the excess return rate is larger and the invested capital is larger, the excess profits earned by the enterprise each year are higher, and the value of the intangible assets of the enterprise is higher.This paper hopes to provide a methodological reference for the evaluation of intangible assets of domestic high-tech enterprises through comparative analysis of various valuation methods of intangible assets, so as to promote high-tech enterprises to strengthen the awareness of intangible assets management and give full play to the advantages of intangible assets. Establish a long-term competitive advantage for the company and obtain excess returns.

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