设立研发子公司促进了企业集团的协同创新吗?

Does the Setting of R&D Subsidiaries in Business Groups will Facilitate Collaborative Innovation?

作为集团创新体系的重要组成部分,研发子公司的设立是否能有效提升企业集团的协同创新水平及其影响机制值得深入研究。本文在采用多种方法排除内生性问题后研究发现:研发子公司的设立显著提升了企业集团的协同创新水平。机制检验发现,设立研发子公司主要通过发挥“信息共享”和“知识溢出”效应以实现创新资源在集团内部的优化配置,从而促进企业集团的协同创新。异质性分析发现,当集团高管具有研发背景、集团信息不对称程度较低以及金字塔控制链长度较短时,设立研发子公司对企业集团协同创新的促进作用更为显著。文章以“自下而上”的研究范式丰富了企业集团协同创新的影响因素,同时为企业集团优化内部资源配置效率、提升协同创新水平提供了有益的启示。

It has become a common consensus among Chinese enterprises and governments to rely on external entities for collaborative innovation to promote enterprises’high-quality development and drive regional innovation development.As business group is one of the most important forms of modern economic organizations,the improvement of the collaborative innovation of the business groups not only helps enterprises break through their own innovation bottlenecks and maintain their competitive advantages,but also is of great significance for the country to achieve innovation-driven development and economic transformation and upgrading.Therefore,considering R&D subsidiary is an important part of the business groups’innovation system,it is worth investigating whether establishing R&D subsidiaries can promote the collaborative innovation of the business groups and its impact mechanism.Based on a sample of A-share listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges from 2009 to 2020,this paper adopts the difference in difference estimate method to explore the impact of establishing R&D subsidiaries on collaborative innovation of the business groups.The results show that establishing R&D subsidiaries significantly improves the collaborative innovation of the business groups.The findings of the paper still hold after robustness tests and endogeneity treatments such as replacing proxy variables and research sample,replacing estimation methods and using instrumental variables method.The underlying mechanism through which the establishment of R&D subsidiaries facilitates collaborative innovation of the enterprise groups is“information sharing”and“knowledge spillover”,which can achieve the optimal allocation of innovation resources within the group.Furthermore,When the business group executives have R&D background,information asymmetry of the business group is low,and the length of the pyramid control chain is short,the positive impact of the establishment of R&D subsidiaries on the group’s collaborative innovation level can be strengthened.This paper enriches the research on the influencing factors of collaborative innovation of parent and subsidiary companies in a bottom-up research paradigm,and provides generalized and valuable guidance for business groups to optimize the efficiency of internal resource allocation and improve the output of collaborative innovation.The possible research contributions of this paper are as follows:Firstly,this paper expands the research of the economic consequences of establishing R&D subsidiaries.Based on the perspective of overseas R&D,the existing literature examines the impact of overseas R&D subsidiaries on the innovation performance of the parent company by acquiring unique advantages from the host country and transferring them to the parent company in the reverse direction,but there is lack of the research on the establishment of local R&D subsidiaries by business groups.Based on the perspective of coordinating and integrating group resources,this paper focuses on the impact of establishing local R&D subsidiaries on the collaborative innovation of business groups through the effects of“information sharing”and“knowledge spillover”,which provides new empirical evidence on the economic consequences of establishing R&D subsidiaries.Secondly,it enriches the research on the influencing factors of collaborative innovation in business groups.This paper empirically examines the impact of establishing local R&D subsidiaries on collaborative innovation of the business groups.This paper enriches the factors influencing collaborative innovation in the business groups with a“bottom-up”and“point-to-point”research paradigm,and broadens the application of enterprise network organization theory in the group context.Finally,from the perspective of R&D backgrounds of executives,the degree of information asymmetry,and the pyramid control chain,this paper analyzes the heterogeneous effects of establishing R&D subsidiaries on enterprise group collaborative innovation,which provides micro evidence and theoretical references for enterprise groups to take targeted measures to improve the effect of collaborative innovation.