资质认定型创新政策能否促进企业技术创新“增量提质”——来自国家认定企业技术中心政策的证据

作为突破关键核心技术和引领行业技术进步的重要载体,国家认定企业技术中心政策对于经济转型背景下企业创新水平提升是否发挥有效作用及其作用机制值得深入研究。文章利用国家认定企业技术中心政策作为准自然实验,基于2006—2018年中国A股上市公司数据进行实证研究。研究发现,国家认定企业技术中心政策显著提升了以发明专利申请数度量的创新数量及以专利知识宽度衡量的创新质量,具有明显的"增量提质"特征。异质性分析表明,这一促进作用在企业属于国有企业、高新技术行业和所处市场化程度更低时更为明显。影响机制发现,国家认定企业技术中心政策作用于企业技术创新的路径依赖于其能够为企业嫁接财务资源、发挥人才集聚和产学研合作效应。拓展性研究表明,国家企业技术中心认定政策通过知识溢出发挥创新引领示范作用。文章对国家夯实国家认定企业技术中心政策的成果,完善关键核心技术攻关的新型举国体制提供了政策参考。

Does the Qualification-certified Innovation Policy Promote the Quantity and Quality of Enterprise Innovation: Evidence from the National Enterprise Technology Center Recognition Policy

As China's economy enters a new normal development stage, promoting innovation-driven organic growth has become an important direction to promote economic development transformation and achieve high-quality economic development. As the main power source of innovation-driven development, how to enhance the innovation capability of enterprises, establish world-class innovative enterprises and highlight the leading role of innovative engine enterprises has always been the focus and hot issue of Chinese academia and political circles. Back in the early 1990s, the Chinese government proposed to establish technology centers within enterprises in order to strengthen the construction of enterprise-led technology innovation organizations. After nearly 30 years of development, the number of nationally recognized enterprise technology centers has risen from 40 in 1993 to 1984 in 2020, and has become an important initiative for China to promote enterprises to build high-level R&D institutions and conduct applied basic research and frontier technology development. As an important vehicle for breaking through key core technologies and leading the technological progress of the industry, does the policy of state-recognized enterprise technology centers have a catalytic effect on micro-enterprise technological innovation, and does this catalytic effect improve the quantity or quality of enterprise innovation? What are the links that need to be improved in the current policy of national-level enterprise technology centers? Can the recognition of national-level enterprise technology centers play a leading role in the innovation development of other enterprises in the industry? In the context of the national implementation of innovation-driven development strategy and the focus on cultivating innovative engine enterprises, it is especially critical to clarify the above questions. This paper conducts an empirical study based on the data of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2006-2018 using the policy of nationally recognized enterprise technology centers as a quasi-natural experiment. It is found that the policy of state-recognized enterprisetechnology centers significantly improves the quantity of innovation measured by the number of invention patent applications and the quality of innovation measured by the breadth of patent knowledge, with the obvious characteristic of "increasing quantity and improving quality".Heterogeneity analysis shows that this promotion effect is more pronounced when the enterprises are state-owned enterprises, high-tech industries and less market-oriented. The impact mechanism found that the path of the NETC policy on enterprise technology innovation relies on its ability to graft financial resources, talent clustering, and industry-academia-research cooperation effects on enterprises. An extended study shows that the NETC policy plays an innovation-led demonstration role through knowledge spillover. Therefore, this paper suggests that the government should continue to play the advantage of resource integration and establish a technology project evaluation platform jointly with professional technology recognition institutions to provide an official reference for social investors, while strengthening the publicity and work of the national enterprise technology center recognition policy to deliver stronger signals of government support to the market and improve the market-oriented allocation of innovation resources under government guidance.