| Innovation is an inexhaustible motive force for economic development and a key source for enterprises to gain competitive advantage.Due to the imperfect external system of emerging markets,innovation in enterprises is faced with great challenges in emerging markets.In view of the information transparency,long-term investment and the uncertainty of the results,the innovation behavior of enterprises has been curbed to some extent.Therefore,how to promote the innovation of emerging market companies through reasonable institutional arrangements has become an important issue.Since the 13th Five-Year Guideline was initiated,the government puts forward the innovation-driven development strategy,and vigorously encourages enterprises to make efforts on independent innovation.However,the investments on innovation exhibit huge difference among enterprises.Thus,what are the driving forces of innovation investment?How can they affect the innovation?These questions have been a hot issue in academic circles.Therefore,the precise mechanism remains to be further studied.It is not only the internal resources of enterprises,but also the heterogeneous information and resources out of enterprises that are necessary for innovation.In the context of the increasingly close contact and cooperation between enterprises and as boundaries of enterprises are increasingly blurred,the importance of inter-organizational networks in enterprise innovation activities has become increasingly prominent.With the dual characteristics of governance and access to external resources,the network of interlocking directors is an important form of inter firm network,which is embedded in the enterprise for a long time.Domestic and overseas scholars have taken up large-scale researches on the interlocking directors and their influence,but there remains a big controversy.Therefore,this paper discusses the influence of the network of interlocking directors on the innovation behavior of enterprises from the perspective of agency theory and resource dependence theory.This study uses the methods of theoretical analysis and empirical research to explore the relationship between the network of interlocking directors and innovation investment.In theoretical analysis,combined with the resource dependence theory and agency theory,this study discusses the interlock director network brings to the enterprise resources and agency problems,which will influence the expenditure on innovation.Moreover,this study analyzes the symbolic organization redundancy as the internal resources and potential agency problems,to regulate investment relationship of interlocking directorates and innovation.In the empirical analysis,Based on the method of social network analysis,this study uses the Chinese A-share listed companies during the period 2008-2015 as research samples and empirically examines the effects of enterprise’s position in interlocking directorate networks on innovation investment,from perspective of structural embeddedness.Besides,the System GMM estimation method is adopted in this paper to estimate the influence of network centrality and structural holes on enterprise innovation,as well as the moderating role of slack.Through the theoretical and empirical analysis,this study has drawn the following four conclusions:(1)The improvement of the degree of network centrality of the interlocking directors has a negative effect on the innovation input.Extensive network connection will worsen the agency relationship in the enterprises,thereby reducing the motives to develop long-term value creation activities.(2)Structural holes are positively correlated with R&D investment.The enterprise can acquire heterogeneous information and control power on the position of structural holes.(3)Organizational slack will negatively moderate the effect of the network centrality on R&D investment,namely the higher degree of slack,the inhibited effects of network centrality on innovation investment is stronger;instead,organizational slack has positive role in the relations between the structural holes and R&D investment,which means that the degree of organizational slack is higher,the promotion effects of structural holes on the R&D investment is stronger,as the internal and external resources have complementary effect to jointly promote the innovation investment.(4)The moderating effects of organizational slack on the relations between interlock network and innovation are different in the companies of different property rights.The moderating effect of organizational slack on the relations between network centrality and innovation investment is stronger in the state-owned enterprises,and the moderating effect of organizational slack on the relationship between structural holes and innovation investment is stronger in the non-state-owned enterprises.The conclusion of this paper also gives some enlightenment to the practice of enterprise management.On the one hand,enterprises should make full use of the complementary effects of interlocking director network structure hole and internal organization slack to enhance the capability of independent innovation.On the other hand,the superposition of agency problems of agency problems should beware of the centrality of interlocking directorates and organizational redundancy brought by the high exposure to the negative impact on enterprise innovation investment. |
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