投资组合网络、竞争性网络联结与技术创新

本文以我国2009—2016年中小板与创业板上市公司为研究样本,研究了以风险投资机构为信息桥构建的投资组合网络的创新作用机制与效果。研究结果表明:企业的技术创新水平随着其建立的网络联结数量的增长而得到了显著提升;企业在投资组合网络中感知到的竞争威胁主要通过竞争性网络联结传导,竞争性网络联结数量的增长会损害企业的技术创新;风险投资机构的联合投资行为可以减弱竞争性网络联结的负向影响。考虑到企业技术创新活动的异质性将其划分为渐进式创新与突破式创新后,发现突破式创新较少受到投资组合网络内竞争性信息泄露的负面影响。

Portfolio Network,Competitive Network Ties and Technological Innovation

Since the reform and opening up policy,China's economy has been developing rapidly and its economic aggregate has become the second largest in the world.However,in the process of development,China's economy is also faced with many challenges,such as the weak competitiveness of enterprises,the low-end position in the industrial chain,and the lack of momentum in long-term development.The only way for enterprises to maintain long-term competitive advantages is to promote technological innovation and cultivate core competitiveness.With the rapid development of venture capital industry,the network formed by venture capital is pervasively common.The“embeddedness”perspective has brought attention to social network issues in the field of innovation.On one hand,the functions of networks are subject to contingency,and the existing research has not reached a consensus on the innovation mechanism of social networks.On the other hand,the existing research on venture capital network mostly takes the syndication network as the research perspective,ignoring the potential impact of inter-firm portfolio network formed by VC's diversification investment.The establishment and expansion of portfolio network can bring rich network ties as well as intensified agency conflicts which expose network firms to the threat of competitive information leakage.When the network resource effect and information effect are interacted with the competitive information leakage effect,will the portfolio network improve network firm's technological innovation as VCs advocated in their investment vision,is worthy of our in-depth research.The possible contributions of this paper are as follows:First,existing research barely focuses on portfolio network.The excellent value screening ability of venture capital institutions endows the portfolio network with rich innovative resource attributes.Based on this,this paper focuses on the composition of portfolio network members and combines the principal-agent theory and competitive information leakage hypothesis to enrich the theoretical and empirical research about social network relationship embeddedness.Second,analyzing from the perspective of portfolio network not only makes up for the limitation in existing literature focusing only on the syndication network,but also generates a more comprehensive understanding of China's venture capital industry,which can provide theoretical reference and empirical basis for the government to guide the venture capital industry to play the role of promoting enterprise innovation.Based on data from firms listed on ChiNext board or SME board between 2009 to 2016,we undertake the empirical tests and the results show that the technological innovation level of enterprises has been significantly improved with the increase of the number of network ties established.The competitive threats perceived by enterprises in the portfolio network are mainly transmitted through competitive network ties.The syndication behavior of venture capital institutions can weaken the negative influence caused by competitive network ties.Considering the heterogeneity of enterprise technological innovation activities,it is found that breakthrough innovation is less affected by competitive information leakage in portfolio network.The findings of this paper suggest that in order to improve the technological innovation of small and medium sized enterprises,it is necessary for regulators to encourage venture capital institutions to set up the internal communication platform in their portfolios.Besides,regulators should also be fully aware of the risk of competitive information leakage caused by competitive network ties in VC's portfolios and further improve the legislation on intellectual property protection to protect the progressive technological innovation of enterprises.From the perspective of enterprises,they should make full use of the resource attribute of portfolio network and strengthen their awareness of intellectual property protection in advance to reduce the potential innovation damage caused by competitive network ties.