The Study Of Influencing Factors Of Corporate Innovation And Its Peer Effects From The Perspective Of Social Network

Corporate innovation ability is an important factor affecting firm value and economic performance.Active innovation strategy can provide continuous driving force for the sustainable development of the company.Under the background of the networking of corporate social relations,the influence of corporate innovation activities has broken through simple stakeholder boundaries.Corporate innovation decision-making and innovation behavior will spread widely in the social network,and exhibit the similarity and peer effects.Innovation strategy is one of the most important strategic decisions of the company.This dissertation empirically examines the impact of corporate social network on corporate innovation from three aspects: innovation input,innovation performance and innovation efficiency.I extend the “director/CEO network” commonly used in existing literatures to the“core management team network”,establish social network connections based on the core management members' multi-overlap employment,build a larger and wider corporate social network,and make a deeper network structure analysis for Chinese listed companies' innovation activities.Furthermore,I investigate the effects of firm heterogeneity on the relationship between social networks and corporate innovation from the two dimensions of regional innovation capability and state ownership,and explore the potential influencing mechanism of social networks driving corporate innovation from two channels of agency costs and financing constraints.Some firms' economic decision-making and economic behavior have peer effects in corporate social network,and firms will be affected by their peer firms constructed in social network when making decisions.The social network in which firms are embedded is like a“group”.The richer the social connections in this group,the smoother the information exchange between individuals,the cheaper the information costs,and the stronger the peer effects.Based on the peer relationships in social network,this dissertation empirically examines whether there is the peer effect in corporate innovation activities.In addition,I investigate the influence of institutional environment on the peer effects in social network,and further analyze the effect of social network characteristics on the intensity of peer effects.The results are shown as follows:(1)The corporate social network has a significant positive effect in promoting innovation investment and innovation performance.The firm,which is with more social ties,more central network position,higher network centrality,better connection quality,shorter connection path and stronger ability to control shortest path,has greater R&D investment and patent performance.The conclusion is robust after controlling endogenous issues(including reverse causality and correlated omitted variables),which indicates that there is a causal relationship between social networks and innovation investment,as well as between social networks and innovation performance,and these causal relationships are significantly monotonic.(2)Whether I measure innovation efficiency from patent application process or from unit input-output,there is no robust and significant causal relationship between corporate social network and innovation efficiency,but only a robust and positive linear correlation between them.(3)Analyses of firm heterogeneity suggest that state ownership restrains the positive effect of social networks on innovation input and innovation output.Corporate social network has a greater impact on non-state-owned enterprises than state-owned enterprises.Regional innovation capability has an asymmetric moderating effect on the relationship between social networks and innovation inputs and between social networks and innovation outputs.Companies located in low innovation capability region have better R&D investment driven by social networks,by contrast,companies located in high innovation capability region have better patent performance driven by social networks.There is also heterogeneity in the relationship between corporate social network and innovation efficiency.The correlation between social networks and patent unit input-output efficiency is higher in high innovation capability region;the correlation between social networks and two types of innovation efficiency is higher in non-state-owned enterprises.(4)The mechanism analyses show that corporate social network enhances both R&D investment and patent performance through financing constraints channel.Alleviating corporate financing constraints and optimizing the financing environment is the important influencing mechanism of the social network driving corporate innovation.However,agency costs channel only plays a role in the process of corporate social network improving patent performance.(5)Corporate innovation activities(both R&D investment and patent performance)have significant social network peer effects.After excluding the peer effects in the same region and same industry,social network peer effects of corporate innovation still exist robustly.The stronger the R&D input intensity and patent output scale of the peer firms are in the social network,the more the R&D investment and patent performance of the target firms are.(6)The institutional environment has a negative moderating effect on the social network peer effects of corporate innovation.Corporate innovation has a weaker social network peer effects in regions with good business environment,legal protection level and marketization degree.Firms are more likely to be affected by social network peer firms in regions with poor institutional environment.(7)The corporate social network centrality is negatively related to the peer difference of R&D investment and patent performance,and positively related to the peer effects intensity of R&D investment and patent performance.Firms with more social ties face higher intensity of peer effects in social network.This dissertation integrates social networks,corporate innovation,agency costs and financial constraints into a unified analysis framework and finds that corporate social network can drive corporate innovation through “agency costs channel” and “financial constraints channel”.Firms with rich social network connections can alleviate the internal agency conflicts and the external financial constraints by reducing the information asymmetry between inside and outside the companies.The financing environment with weak financial constraints is helpful for firms to raise funds for R&D activities,thus promoting the corporate innovation level.The study of peer effects in social network is the extension of social network studies.I confirm that corporate innovation is not only driven by the corporate social network characteristics,but also affected by the innovation activities of the peer firms in the social network.In the context of social networks,both the network structural characteristics of enterprises and their network connected enterprises have substantial impacts on corporate innovation decision-making and innovation performance.The conclusion of this dissertation contributes to deepening the study on the effect of corporate social network on corporate governance practice,enriching the literature on the influencing factors of corporate innovation from the perspective of social network,expanding the identification strategy and research scope of peer effects,and providing suggestions and directions for listed companies to make innovation decisions and improve innovation performance.