董事技术专长、创新效率与企业绩效

Technology Expertise of Directors,Innovation Efficiency and Enterprise Performance

在中国创新发展的历程中,技术专家型董事对企业创新的推动作用日渐凸显,这为研究中国特色自主创新道路下的董事会治理提供了崭新而重要的视角。本文以我国2007-2013年上市公司为样本,采用手工搜集的技术专家型董事数据,探讨其对企业绩效的影响以及作用机理。实证结果显示,技术专家型董事对企业绩效有显著正向影响,创新效率在二者关系中起到部分中介作用,且该作用兼具时滞效应与当期效应。进一步研究发现,虽然不同类型的技术专家型董事在内部信息持有量与独立性方面存在差异,但对创新效率皆有显著提升作用。上述结果在考虑内生性问题以及稳健性检验后依然成立,为技术专家型董事的创新驱动效应提供了实证依据,也对构建支持创新的公司治理机制具有重要启示。

Innovation activities, which are increasingly valued by government, academies and firms, have a great influence on the development of enterprise. Different from the existing literature on innovation activities mostly discussing the effects of corporate governance and innovation inputs, this article takes the perspective of board governance, and focuses on the governance influences of technology expert directors, who are directors with their own technical expertise and professional backgrounds. Innovation efficiency represents the core competitiveness of the firm and enterprise performance means the firm's real operating results. In theory, there should be a positive relation between core competitiveness and enterprise performance, i.e. as core competitiveness improves, enterprise performance will also improve. Therefore, we used innovation efficiency as the mediating variable and examined to which extent technology expert directors affect it. In accordance with the structure of the board, we divided technology expert directors into three parts, i.e. executive directors, non-executive directors, and independent directors. Based on listed companies who disclosed R&D expenditures information successively from year 2007 to 2013 and the research paradigm of 'Technology Expertise of Directors-Innovation Efficiency-Enterprise Performance', we utilized the mediating variable to study the working mechanism of technology expert directors on enterprise performance. We can draw three conclusions from the empirical study: Firstly, technology expert directors have a significant positive impact on enterprise performance and innovation efficiency. Secondly, technology expert directors affect the enterprise performance partly through innovation efficiency, which means innovation efficiency acts as a mediating variable. Thirdly, after solving the endogenous problems, we proved that not only the technology expert directors as a whole affect innovation efficiency, but each part of it has positive effects on innovation activities as well. This paper extends and enriches the research findings on 'Board Governance', and also offers enlightenment for building the structure of corporate governance which is oriented towards innovation.