Knowledge Spillovers, Heterogeneity And Innovation Performance

Knowledge has becoming a competitive advantage of enterprises in the technological era. Besides of the knowledge base inside a company, the knowledge outside its boundaries has become the new research point. However, it is not enough for the enterprises to espouse to the outside knowledge environment, on the contrary, the enterprise needs to improve its ability to recognize, assimilate and exploit the outside knowledge, which is so called “absorptive ability”.This paper uses an unbalanced panel data which contains 27334 observations of 14889 enterprises from 2005-2007 to analyze the effect of the spillovers of a district to the innovation performance of enterprises. At the same time, the article introduces heterogeneity, which includes the heterogeneity of external knowledge, the heterogeneity of firms, the heterogeneity of knowledge environment, and analyze how these heterogeneities affect the innovation performance. We come to these main conclusions as below:(1)First of all, the stock of knowledge in an area is positively related to the enterprises’ innovation performance.(2)Secondly, though the knowledge from a person does not have any impact on the innovation performance, those knowledge come from other enterprises and universities seen to have great effects on innovation. While the appearance ones and the practical ones show significant influences on promoting a company’s innovation, the patent that is invention seems to a obstruct, and this hindered disappear when the absorptive of the enterprise increase and finally it turns out to be positive.(3)Thirdly, the enterprises with higher absorptive ability tend to be more creative when considering about outside knowledge.(4)Finally, enterprises become more effective at using the external knowledge in a turbulent environment and with a higher protect of intellectual property.