行业锦标赛激发了企业策略性创新吗

Do Industry Tournament Incentives Inspire Firms’Stra-tegic Innovation

合理的薪酬契约安排是促进员工努力工作并提高企业绩效的重要手段,企业内部薪酬差距的作用受到广泛关注,但外部薪酬差距及其激励效应并未得到充分重视。本文将锦标赛理论从企业内部拓展到企业外部,从理论上阐释了行业锦标赛激励影响企业渐进性创新与突破性创新的差异化机制。本研究基于发明专利被引情况对企业突破性创新加以识别,以中国制造业A股上市公司2008—2018年的面板数据为样本进行了实证检验。研究结果发现:行业锦标赛激励促进了企业的渐进性创新,但抑制了突破性创新,企业存在明显的策略性创新行为;依靠工具变量法解决内生性问题,通过替换变量、延长滞后期限、替换回归方法和增加控制变量,保证了研究结论的稳健性;异质性检验显示,民营与外资企业的策略性创新行为更为突出,国有企业的创新行为则与行业锦标赛激励无关,高科技企业的突破性创新也不会受到行业锦标赛激励的影响;机制检验表明,行业锦标赛激励通过提升企业短期投资占比和降低企业风险容忍程度作用于企业策略性创新行为。本文不仅为解释企业“创新假象”和“专利泡沫”困境提供了一个新视角,而且对于通过优化薪酬契约安排培育高质量技术创新具有启示意义。

To achieve long-term corporate prosperity and high-quality national development,it is imperative for enterprises to shift their innovation models from imitation learning and excessive low-quality incremental innovation to original,pioneering,and high-quality breakthrough innovation.In this process,the compensation structure and contract design within organizations play a crucial role as essential supports for endogenous innovation.While existing research has highlighted the importance of internal pay gaps for technological innovation and has discussed the impact of perceived external pay disparity on corporate performance,there is a lack of empirical exploration from the efficiency perspective of tournament theory.This gap makes it challenging to explain why enterprises in different industries choose different innovation behaviors when their internal pay structures are similar.Based on this,this study attempts to extend tournament theory from the internal corporate level to the industry level,examining the impact of industry tournament incentives on the selection of corporate innovation strategies.This aims to provide theoretical and empirical support for fostering breakthrough innovation during the high-quality development stage.The study finds the following:First,in the face of fierce industry tournaments,the stronger the incentive for executives to obtain higher compensation through outstanding business performance in their current positions or to gain more prestigious and powerful positions in better enterprises within the industry,the more likely they are to reduce risk tolerance and increase short-term investments.This is achieved by accumulating and enhancing their professional reputation through more controllable,short-term,high-return,and market-attractive incremental innovations,making them more competitive candidates to become tournament winners.Although breakthrough innovation can bring significant prestige and greatly increase the likelihood of executives advancing in the tournament,the potential doubts,the risk of project failure,and the possible stigmatization,along with the"planting trees for others'shade"dilemma,make executives inclined to minimize or avoid such investments.This finding holds even after accounting for the relative investment differences among companies.Second,in state-owned enterprises(SOEs)and hightech enterprises with richer technological activities,the strategic innovation behavior induced by industry tournaments is significantly weakened.This can be explained by the fact that managers in SOEs face relatively limited promotion incentives under the selection and appointment by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission(SASAC)and the"salary cap"policy,while also bearing the important task of technological breakthroughs in fields such as materials science,engineering science,high-speed rail,and supercomputers.Therefore,SOEs do not exhibit obvious strategic innovation behaviors.High-tech enterprises,with richer knowledge reserves and more active technological innovation activities,have stronger tolerance for failures in long-term innovation activities.Furthermore,the rapidly changing technological iterations and winner-takes-all industry environment amplify the dual loss of wealth and prestige for lagging executives,intensifying their reemployment difficulties,which weakens strategic innovation behavior in hightech enterprises.The conclusions of this study have significant contributions to research on tournament incentives,executive behavior choices,and organizational innovation management.On one hand,this study,based on tournament theory,explores the potential impact of the external labor market on executives'innovation behaviors,revealing from the efficiency perspective the strategic innovation choices of executives facing industry tournaments.This enriches and supple-ments current research on internal corporate tournament incentives and executive behavior choices.On the other hand,considering the heavy-tailed distribution characteristic of invention patent citations,the study proposes an effective new method to identify break-through innovation.It addresses issues of time-section and technical field differences in patent citation statistics,providing valuable sup-plementation to research on organizational innovation identification and management.This study offers important insights into how Chinese enterprises can drive innovation model adjustments through compensation design and support national high-quality development in the new era.For enterprises,it is essential not only to optimize internal compensation structures considering external pay levels in the same industry but also to improve supervisory mechanisms and risk toler-ance,designing compensation systems and evaluation frameworks oriented towards breakthrough innovation.This would facilitate a smoother transition from emphasizing the quantity of innovation to strengthening the quality of innovation.For the government,it is necessary to create an innovation ecosystem that encourages break-through technologies,utilizing fiscal,tax,and financial measures to support high-quality corporate innovation,enhancing scrutiny and penalties for junk patents,and supporting breakthroughs in key core technologies at the institutional level to promote national high-qual-ity development.