企业创新信号与政府风险投资--基于制度逻辑视角

Start-ups’Patent Signals and Governmental Venture Capitalist Investment:From the Perspective of Institutional Logics

本文研究我国中小企业创新信号对政府风险投资(GVC)决策的影响。首先基于制度逻辑视角对我国GVC秉持的国家逻辑进行理论建构,提出GVC将投资创新企业视为重要的自身绩效衡量指标和合法性来源,并结合信号理论提出假设,认为中小企业传递的专利创新信号越强,越能获得GVC青睐。以2000~2016年我国风险投资事件为样本进行研究,结果表明:中小企业的专利数量、多样性、创新程度均正向影响GVC投资与否(相较于PVC而言)和GVC投资估值,并且当GVC的国有股权比例或本地投资占比越高时,其国家逻辑会被强化,进而增强这三种创新信号对GVC投资估值的正向影响。本文证实了我国GVC对企业创新信号的解读受国家逻辑驱动,并界定了国家逻辑发挥作用的边界条件,深化了我国情境下对GVC投资决策影响因素的理解。

Chinese government has set up governmental venture capitalists(GVCs)and is increasingly doing so,with the aim of fostering the innovation and entrepreneurship in the society and boosting economic development.Prior studies mostly focus on the effect of GVC investment on start-up performance.Some recent studies find that GVCs may have preference distinct from private VCs in selecting start-ups but mainly stop at descriptive analysis.Relatively less attention has been paid to exploring the potential impact of start-up innovation on GVC investment decision.Acknowledging this important research gap,our research examines how and why the investment decision of GVCs could be affected by start-ups’innovation signals such as patents.Drawing on institutional logic perspective,we theorize on the meaning of the state logic of GVCs in China,and propose that different from PVCs that are embedded in the professional logic,GVCs are dominated by the state logic and tend to consider their investment in start-ups with patents as an important criterion and a key contributor to maintain their legitimacy.Combining with signaling theory,we hypothesize that three types of patent characteristics of start-ups(i.e.,patent amount,patent diversity,and patent innovativeness),as signals,will boost the likelihood of being invested by GVC(compared to invested by PVC)as well as receiving higher valuation by GVC.Moreover,when a GVC confirms more to the state logic,as reflected by the state-ownership in GVC and the ratio of GVC’s local deals in the overall portfolio,the positive signaling effects of the three types of patent signals on GVC valuation will be strengthened.We tested our hypotheses with a unique dataset of venture capitalist investments in China from year 2000 to year 2016.The sources of dataset include CVSource,SIPO,and other public sources such as Tianyancha.com.The first dependent variable,i.e.,GVC investment likelihood,is a dummy denoting whether the lead VC is GVC or PVC,using random-effects logit panel re-gression on a sample of 11071 investment deals.The second dependent variable is a continuous one,i.e.,GVC valuation,meas-ured by the pre-money valuation of a deal led by GVC,using random-effects panel regression on a sample of 2900 GVC invest-ment deals.The results based on the sample of 11071 investment deals,including both start-ups invested by GVC and PVC,show that the three patent signals all have a positive effect on GVC investment likelihood.The results based on the GVC-investment sample,in-cluding only start-ups invested by GVC,indicate that the three patent signals all have a positive effect on GVC valuation.Further-more,almost all the positive effects of three patent signals on GVC valuation are strengthened as the proportion of state-ownership in GVC or the ratio of GVC’s local deals in the overall portfolio increases.This study contributes to the GVC literature by contextualizing and elaborating the state logic of China’s GVCs as well as by demonstrating that the state logic drives GVCs’investment decision to a large extent and influences their interpretation of start-ups’patent signals.The examination of the contingent effects of patent signals on GVC investment(i.e.,state-ownership in GVC and the ratio of GVC’s local deals as two key contextual factors)corroborates that GVC’s selection is largely driven by the state logic,and also adds a nuanced perspective to the under-explored topic of start-ups’innovation and GVC’s selection.It provides a solid theoretical foundation for future research on GVC effectiveness.Future research may further explore antecedents of GVC investment decisions from the following two aspects.First,consider-ing GVC heterogeneity,future studies may examine whether affiliation of GVCs(e.g.,affiliated with local or central government)may shape their interpretation of innovation signals and thus affect their investment decisions.Second,in terms of start-up hetero-geneity,start-ups’state-ownership and political ties may also affect how consistent their institutional logic is to the state logic of GVCs and thus could be factored in GVCs’investment decisions.