Industrial Characteristic, Knowledge Externality And Corporate Independent Innovation

Independent innovation is essential to corporate survival and development. However, under-investmentin R&D of Chinese companies is widespread.One of the important reasons for that is the externality ofinnovation which leads to knowledge spillover, resulting in the loss of innovation revenue. And there aresignificant industrial differences among the size of the innovation externality, the corporate R&Dinvestment behaviors and patent behaviors. So this paper theoretically analyzes the influencing factors ofcorporate R&D investment behaviors and patent behaviors at both the inter-industry and intra-industry level,basing on the theory of externality, the industrial organization theory and the patent race theory, from theperspectives of the differences in market structure elements and the strategic interaction between differentcompanies in a certain industry.In the empirical research part, this paper constructs the industrial intellectual property risk system basingon the market structure elements of industry characteristic, and empirically tests the impact of the industrialintellectual property risk on corporate R&D investment and patent applications, using the sample of Chineselisted companies that disclose the data of R&D investment in2007-2010. Results show that there aresignificant differences among industries in the intellectual property risk and the industrial intellectual propertyrisk has a significant negative impact on corporate R&D investment; Chinese listed companies take differenttypes of patent application behaviors to respond to different types of industrial intellectual property risk.In theintra-industry level, this paper determines the types of patent race of different industries basing on thedescriptive statistics, and then calculating the competitive-distance weight matrix, using the spatial lag model,empirically tests the strategic interaction of R&D investment and patent behaviors of companies with differntcompetitive positions in five manufacturing industries and the IT industry. Results show that in the mainindustries, there are three typical patterns of the patent race, reflecting different patent race characteristic of theabsolute preemptive model, theε-preemptive model and the non-leadership model.The innovation of this paper concludes: First, in the research level of inter-industry, this paper combinesthe theory of knowledge externality and the industrial organization theory, to analyze the market structureelements that affect corporate R&D investment, and constructs the industrial intellectual property risk system.Second, in the research level of intra-industry, this paper analyzes the impact of the interaction of R&Dinvestment and patent application behaviors among competitive companies and leading companies oncorporate R&D investment, and for the first time using new measuring system and spatial econometricmethods in the related empirical research to test this topic.