利益相关者“创新关注”促进了企业创新吗--来自深交所“互动易”的证据

Can Stakeholders’Attention to Innovation Improve Corporate Innovation?Evidence from irm.cninfo.com.cn under SSE

在互联网飞速发展的情境下,利益相关者能够通过互联网平台关注企业相关信息。那么利益相关者对企业创新层面信息的关注如何影响企业创新呢?本文基于深交所“互动易”平台数据,采用中文分词、关键词提取等文本分析方法构建“创新关注”指标,实证检验“创新关注”对企业创新的影响及其影响机制。研究发现,“创新关注”有助于企业创新投入水平的提升;在采用工具变量法和倾向得分匹配法控制内生性问题后,该结论依旧成立。当企业融资约束较大、风险承担水平较低时,“创新关注”对企业创新投入的促进效应更强,说明“创新关注”能够缓解企业融资约束困境、提升企业风险承担水平,进而促进企业创新投入,验证了融资约束假说和创新失败容忍度假说。此外,“创新关注”对企业创新产出和创新效率均表现出显著的促进效应,故排除了迎合假说。本文首次发现利益相关者“创新关注”是驱动企业创新的重要因素,丰富了利益相关者与企业创新方面的相关研究,为国家创新驱动发展战略实施提供了理论支持和实践建议。

The stakeholder theory suggests that stakeholders could participate in corporate governance and influence corporate decisions through formal or informal means.In the scenario of the rapid development of the Internet,stakeholders usually follow firms’information through Internet platforms.Existing papers mainly study how corporate innovation is affected by stakeholders’attention to overall information,which includes information on innovation,accounting performance,market competitiveness,and supplier relationships,and show that the impacts of stakeholders’attention to different information on corporate innovation are not uniform and the influence mechanisms are also different.This paper argues that the relationship between corporate innovation and stakeholders’attention to innovation is more direct and closer than that between corporate innovation and stakeholders’attention to overall infor-mation.Therefore,this paper tries to analyze how stakeholders’attention affects corporate innovation from the perspective of stake-holders’attention to innovation.Specifically,based on the data of Question&Answer from irm.cninfo.com.cn under Shenzhen Stock Exchange,this paper first di-vides stakeholders’attention into innovation attention and other attention to construct a new variable to measure stakeholders’atten-tion to innovation by using some textual analysis methods,such as Chinese word separation and keyword extraction.Then,this paper empirically examines how stakeholders’attention to innovation affects corporate innovation input,innovation output,and innovation efficiency.It is found that stakeholders’attention to innovation could promote corporate innovation input,and this finding still holds after controlling for endogeneity issues.Furthermore,results show that the promotion effect is stronger for firms with higher financ-ing constraints or for firms with lower risk-taking levels,which conforms to the predictions of the financing constraints hypothesis and the innovation failure tolerance hypothesis respectively.In addition,stakeholders’attention to innovation could significantly im-prove corporate innovation output and corporate innovation efficiency,which excludes the catering hypothesis.This paper contributes to existing literature in three theoretical aspects.Firstly,it adds to literature on the effect of stakeholders’at-tention to innovation from the perspective of innovation attention.This paper uses the textual analysis methods to construct a new variable named stakeholders’attention to innovation and finds that stakeholders’attention to innovation is an important factor driving corporate innovation.Secondly,this paper extends research on the influence of stakeholders’attention to innovation from the per-spective of financing constraints.Combining with the financing constraints theory,this paper finds that stakeholders’attention to in-novation could alleviate corporate financing constraints and thus promote corporate innovation.Thirdly,this paper extends research on the influence of stakeholders’attention to innovation from the perspective of innovation failure tolerance.Combining with the innovation failure tolerance theory,this paper finds that stakeholders’attention to innovation could enhance stakeholders’tolerance to innovation failure and thus promote corporate innovation.This paper also has important value in terms of practice.First,this paper suggests that relevant departments should actively improve the platform of irm.cninfo.com.cn.For example,they can set up categorized columns,such as performance columns,innovation col-umns,and product columns on irm.cninfo.com.cn,to further reduce the information access cost of stakeholders,which could attract stakeholders to pay more attention to innovation information,thus promoting corporate innovation.Second,this paper suggests that enterprises should strengthen information disclosure and improve information transparency of innovation activities,which could attract financial supports from stakeholders and alleviate financing constraints of innovation projects,thus promoting corporate in-novation.Third,this paper suggests that investors and other stakeholders should pay more attention to information about corporate innovation activities,understand the characteristics of high failure rate and high return rate of innovation projects,and enhance their tolerance for corporate innovation failure.It is necessary to create an innovation atmosphere that encourages innovation and tolerates failure,which could increase managers’willingness to take risks and enhance the corporate risk-taking level,thus promoting corpo-rate innovation and helping China further implement the innovation-driven development strategy.