The Effects Of Governmental R&D Subsidy On R&D Strategies Of Firms

Innovation-driven has become a social consensus to promote China’s economic development.As the main force of innovation,firms undertake important missions.However,due to the high-risk and spillovers of R&D,the enthusiasm of firms cannot be sustained.In order to make up for such market failure,the government stimulates firms to carry out R&D activities through R&D subsidies – an important policy tool.In recent years,major developed countries have successively introduced R&D subsidy program.Accordingly,the Chinese government has invested heavily in R&D subsidies for firms to support R&D activities.However,what is the effect of government R&D subsidies? How do R&D subsidies affect the R&D strategies of firms? These topics still need to be discussed in depth.In view of the existing research gap,this paper analyzes the impact of R&D subsidies on firm-level R&D strategies from three perspectives: R&D input,R&D output and R&D cooperation.Focus on this topic,the main contents and corresponding conclusions of this paper are as follows:(1)Study 1 analyzes the effects of R&D subsidies on the R&D investment of firms and investigates the mediating mechanism of external financing and moderating effect of specialized industrial agglomeration.This study investigates the R&D subsidies in the context of legitimacy by adding mediating effect of external financing and moderating effect of specialized industrial agglomeration.This study confirms the inverted U-shaped relationship between R&D subsidies and firm-level R&D investment with a turning point of around 80 million yuan.This study demonstrates that recipients in a highly specialized industrial agglomeration can steepen the inverted U-shaped relationship,especially for firms with high-level R&D investments.This study also reveals the processual mechanism of external financing between R&D subsidies and firms’ R&D investment and test the inverted U-shaped relationship between R&D subsidies and external financing.(2)Based on the effects of R&D subsidies on R&D output,study 2 analyzes the output of exploratory patents and exploitative patents.From the perspective of searching for external resources,this study investigates the effects of R&D subsidies on exploratory innovation and exploitative innovation(ambidextrous innovation).Based on attention based view,this study examines the effect of the diversity of subsidy sources on the ambidextrous innovation of firms.Furthermore,this study also distinguishes the types of subsidies,and investigates the heterogeneous impacts of research subsidy and development subsidy on ambidextrous innovation.This study confirms that R&D subsidy has a positive impact on ambidextrous innovation,but excessive diversification of subsidy sources will have a negative impact on exploitative innovation(an inverted U-shaped relationship between them).In addition,research subsidies and development subsidies have a positive role in promoting ambidextrous innovation.Research subsidies and development subsidies have no significant difference in the promotion effect of ambidextrous innovation,but the promotion effect of research subsidies on exploratory innovation is significantly better than development subsidies.(3)Study 3 investigates the multi-factor coordination for escaping the dilemma of R&D cooperation.This study develops a novel decision-making model based on stochastic evolutionary game theory for R&D cooperation between high and low R&D intensive firms.The model is grounded on five factors: R&D subsidies,synergy effects,knowledge spillovers,R&D coordination costs,and absorptive capacity.This study evaluates the effectiveness of 19,683 combinations of these five factors.Drawing on the model,this study proposes a framework for attention allocation on decision making of R&D cooperation.This study demonstrates that multi-factor coordination of the five factors positively affects promoting R&D cooperation,and that R&D subsidies and coordination costs are the main determinants for promoting R&D cooperation,while knowledge spillovers and absorptive capacity are of weak influence.Moreover,this study shows that firms with low R&D intensity are first movers in R&D cooperation strategy adoption.This study adheres to the principle of “linking theory with practice” and follows the research framework of “theoretical perspective – theme context – research methods”.Based on the integration of economics,management,computer science and other disciplines,this study explores the three core topics of the effects of R&D subsidies on firms’ innovation strategies,which expands the relevant theoretical system of R&D subsidy.First,this study reveals the process mechanism between government R&D subsidies and firm-level R&D investment strategies,complements the research of R&D subsidies by discussing legitimate signal,and enriches the discussion of R&D subsidies and firm-level R&D investment in the context of regional innovation.Second,this study enriches the research on R&D subsidies on exploratory innovation and exploitative innovation of firms,extends the resource search strategy to the R&D subsidies,and makes up for the lack of classification of research subsidies and development subsidies.Third,this study extends the stochastic evolutionary game theory to the research of R&D subsidies,develops the stochastic evolutionary game decision-making model and attention allocation framework,and supplements the current literature on R&D cooperation of firms.