Technological Innovation Capability Comparisons Between Automotive Incumbents & New Entrants On Electric Vehicles

In the last decade,the world’s electric vehicle industries have developed rapidly,and it has becoming more and more competitive.Companies that entering this industry include both new entrants such as Tesla and Nio,as well as those incumbents such as Volkswagen and SAIC.But at present,there are several research questions in regarding to new entrants and incumbents: Who has stronger technological innovation capability?And what causes their technological innovation capability different to each other? There is still a lot of debate,but also lack of systematic research.Upon technological changes,comparing new entrants with incumbents has always been the research focusing point over innovation theory.But there are two shortcomings from previous scholars in this research: First,some of the existing theories about new entrants are not in line with the practice of the electric car industry,such as Christensen’s value network theory states that new entrants should enter the electric vehicle market with cheaper or lower trim products,but in fact both Tesla and Nio are entering the market with the high-end vehicles.Second,there are still not many research literature on the technological innovation capability topics related to electric vehicle enterprises,while the comparative literature on the innovation capability of new entrants and those incumbents in the field of electric vehicles is rarer,and there is still a lack of quantitative analysis in the existing research literature.Therefore,it is difficult for existing research to perfectly compare and explain the differences and reasons of technological innovation between the incumbents and new entrants.Based on the literature research of the existing theory of technological innovation,this paper constructs an evaluation system for the technological innovation capability of the incumbents and new entrants in the field of electric vehicles,and first compares the8 incumbents and new entrants’ firms from the input and output aspects of technological innovation according to the modified index system,and then compares the efficiency of technological innovation with Data Envelopment Analysis.Finally,the patent value of the core technology of electric vehicles from 33 Chinese auto companies is compared by Tobit regression analysis.The main conclusions of this study include:(1)New entrants in research and development investment intensity and research and development personnel intensity,as well as the number of valid invention patents per unit of research and development personnel,significantly higher than the number of incumbents.New entrants prefer to invest heavily in research and development and result a higher innovation outputs,while those incumbents invest relatively conservatively and have lower innovation outputs.(2)The technological innovation efficiency of the new entrant is significantly higher than that of the incumbents,the input-output of the new entrants is relatively higher,and the innovation output capability is stronger than that of the incumbents under the same resource input.(3)In terms of the core patent value and number of patents for electric vehicles,especially in the field of electronic control-related technologies,new entrants are ahead of those incumbents.Finally,the conclusion of this dissertation extracts quite a few advice on improving the technological innovation capability for the incumbents and the new entrants,respectively.This study enriches the comparative study of the technological innovation capability of new entrants and those incumbents in the electric vehicles industry and is of great guiding significance to the cultivation of technological innovation capability of electric vehicle enterprises for the future.