Regional R&D Investment And Enterprise Innovation:Theory,Mechanisms,and Evidences

Under the dual background of increasing R&D investment and enterprises' urgent need for innovation,this paper selects regional R&D investment and enterprise innovation as research objects and attempts to fully explain the relationship between them from three aspects: theoretical basis,mechanisms of effect and empirical evidences.First,this paper takes knowledge-based view and theories of knowledge spillovers as reference and explains the theoretical foundation of impact of regional R&D investment on the enterprise innovation from the perspective of knowledge activities and knowledge spillovers.Then this paper proposes two mechanisms and constructs a theoretical framework for regional R&D investment impact on the enterprise innovation with corresponding research hypotheses.Finally,this paper tests the research hypotheses through hierarchical linear modeling after matching the data of China's industrial enterprise database with the corresponding provincial macrolevel data in 2007 and 2006.The empirical results show that: regional R&D investment has a stable and significant positive direct effect on the enterprise innovation.Among them,regional R&D investment of all enterprises in 2007 has a significant positive moderate effect on the enterprise innovation,which means that regional R&D investment in all enterprises will affect the internal R&D efficiency of the enterprise and promote enterprise innovation.However,this moderate effect is not stable,which depends on correlation between regional knowledge activities and enterprise internal knowledge activities.In general,the impact of regional R&D investment on enterprise innovation is in line with the hypothesis of innovation factor theory.Regional R&D investment in human resources has a significant positive moderate effect on the enterprise innovation,which means regional R&D investment in human resources will affect enterprise internal R&D efficiency and promote enterprise innovation.While regional R&D investment in material resources has no significant moderate effect on the enterprise innovation.It shows that the regional R&D investment influences the active knowledge activities of enterprises mainly rely on the human-originated knowledge spillover mechanism.