企业家创新成果对公司业绩的影响研究

Impact of entrepreneurs’ innovation on enterprise performance

企业家是一个公司的灵魂,其参与技术创新活动的成果会影响公司业绩。文章以企业资源视角切入,整合高层阶梯理论、动机不对称理论和企业创新研究的相关成果,对企业家创新成果的特殊性进行了理论分析。文章以企业家参与研发的专利作为企业家创新成果的代理变量,利用2011-2014年中国创业板公司企业家参与研发的专利数据进行了实证研究。研究结果表明:从创新数量来看,企业家参与研发的发明专利成果会显著提升公司业绩;从创新质量来看,发明专利成果对公司业绩的贡献大于企业家参与研发的外观设计以及实用新型成果的贡献。该结论半富了企业家创新的相关理论,对新时代培育、激励和保护企业家精神,引导企业家创新创业具有现实意义。

China has entered a new era in which innovation and entrepreneurship is important driving forces for economic and social development. Corporation is an important part in innovative development. Entrepreneurs are the soul of enterprises. Entrepreneurs are the promoters and decision makers behind the enterprise strategy and daily operation. The behavior of entrepreneurs will have an important impact on the company’s performance. The report of the 19 th National Congress of Communist Party of China has pointed out that entrepreneurship should be encouraged and protected. Innovation is a unique behavior and import part of the process to realize the value of entrepreneurial talent. Thus, will entrepreneurs’ innovation influence firm performance?Previous studies have found that innovation plays a key role in improving corporate performance. From the perspective of corporate resources, this article integrates the extant research of upper echelons theory, incentive asymmetry theory and extant research of enterprise innovation to analyze the superiority of entrepreneurs’ innovation theoretically. Our research propose that entrepreneurs are special and scarce resources for corporations. Innovations entrepreneurs engaged in R&D process have more advantages than normal resource. From the prospective of R&D incentive, entrepreneurs’ innovation has the same orientation as the firm strategy, which avoids the formation of useless innovation and waste of innovation investment. Entrepreneurs is also a kind of unique resource for innovation. Entrepreneurs will provide entrepreneurial talents such as personal ability, market awareness, courage to change and overall vision. Leadership and quality of entrepreneurs is the core competitiveness of corporation value creation. Entrepreneurs’ participation in innovation activities can inject entrepreneurs’ talents into innovations and improve innovation quality. During the process of marketization, entrepreneurs will use their power in the corporation to collaborate other resources to create and achieve the value of entrepreneurs’ innovation. We hypothesis that entrepreneurs’ innovation will have positive influence on firm performance.In extant research, patent is a frequently used measurement of innovation. Along with the previous research, this research uses patent that entrepreneurs engaged in R&D process as the proxy ofentrepreneurs’ innovation. Patent is a usual measurement of innovation. In the Detailed Rules for the Implementation of the Patent Law of the People’s Republic of China has clearly pointed out that ‘inventor’ or ‘designer’ as mentioned in the Patent Law means a person who makes creative contributions to the substantive characteristics of an invention creation. In the process of completing the invention and creation, the person who is only responsible for organizing work, providing convenience for the use of material and technical conditions or engaging in other auxiliary work is not the inventor or designer, we still check whether patent is a reliable proxy of entrepreneurs’ innovation. In order to make further efforts to verify the role of entrepreneurs in the formation of innovation, we compared the education background, work experience, part-time and award winning of entrepreneurs in the sample enterprises from the senior manager character data of CSMAR database, combined with the enterprise annual report, Baidu search and other public information. This study found that most entrepreneurs have participated in the research and development of patents and have relevant technical background required for the achievement or participated in relevant innovation activities.Empirical research collect the patent data that entrepreneurs engaged in R&D process from growth enterprise market during 2011-2014. We use web crawlers to get detailed patent data from the website of National Intellectual Property Office of the People’s Republic of China. We combine the detailed patent data with the detailed firm information and financial report information exported from Wind Economic Database.Empirical result does not show that the total authorized patent that entrepreneurs engaged in R&D process have significant positive impact on firm performance in sight of innovation quantity. However,those authorized inventions that entrepreneurs engaged in R&D process have significant positive impact on firm performance. This study also verified that inventions contribute greater to firm performance than utility models and appearance design in the sight of innovation quality. Our results show that entrepreneurs’ invention will promote firm performance and invention will create more value than utility models and appearance design. These findings provide evidence to support our hypothesis.Our findings have theoretical contribution to the field of entrepreneurs’ innovation. This study provide a new method to research entrepreneurs’ innovation. From the perspective of innovation quality, different forms of patent achievement have different degrees of innovation, among which invention patents have the highest degree of innovation. If the patents that entrepreneurs’ participate in R&D are not subdivided, the result cannot find a significant correlation between entrepreneurs’ innovation results and firm performance. Only when patents are subdivided, it can be observed that the invention patents that entrepreneur participate in R&D play a higher role in improving the firm performance than the appearance design and utility model. There is a significant positive correlation between the authorized invention patents that entrepreneurs participate in R&D and firm performance. However, there is no significant correlation between utility model patents that entrepreneurs participate in R&D and the firm performance and there is a negative correlation between the appearance design patents that entrepreneurs participate in R&D and the company’s performance. This reflects that invention patents contain higher innovation value and economic benefits.Our research provide managerial implication for cultivating, inspiring and protecting entrepreneurship and guiding entrepreneurs to make innovations and start businesses in the new era. Entrepreneurs’ participation in innovation activities can promote the firm performance. The economic benefit of invention is higher than that of appearance design and utility model. Entrepreneurs should systematically allocate limited entrepreneurial talents between innovation activities and other management activities, match and integrate their talents with high-quality resources, and allocate them into R&D with high innovation value, to create more value and promote the firm performance better.