The Impact Of Venture Capital Network On Innovation Performance Of Technology-Based Start-Ups

At present,China is facing not only the need to enhance innovation capacity to accelerate the economic transformation,but also the challenge of financial sector reform to stabilize the economic development.How to help the innovation and development of technology-based start-ups is the common concern of the country,entrepreneurs and investors.As the trend of venture capital networking becomes more and more obvious,it is a valuable research direction to catalyze the innovation of technology-based start-ups by leveraging investors’ social network.The existing research has not yet reached a clear conclusion on the nature of the venture capital network and its impact on the innovation performance of the ventures.Based on the second-order social capital theory,resource dependence theory and signal theory,this research selected 1,852 Chinese biomedical companies that received venture capital from 2000 to 2016 and 2,386 venture capital networks of these companies as research samples,empirically analyzes the influence of the three dimensions of venture capital network(node composition,connection relationship and relationship distribution)on the technological innovation performance of the ventures,and examines the intermediary effect of the venture’s R&D cooperation network in the relationship between the venture capital network and innovation performance,and the moderating effect of the lead investor-venture relationship strength on the relationship between R&D cooperation network and venture capital network is discussed.The study confirms that ventures can catalyze their own innovation performance by leveraging investors’ partnership resources,with key findings including:(1)Node diversity,relationship distance,and network density of the venture capital network can affect the innovation performance of technologybased start-ups.Venture capital network with high node diversity,short relationship paths or overall closure characteristics is conducive to the improvement of the innovation performance of technology-based start-ups.(2)The R&D cooperation network of technology-based start-ups plays a complete intermediary role in the process of catalyzing enterprise innovation by network diversity and network distance of the venture capital network.However,the R&D cooperation network does not play an intermediary role in the relationship between the relationship distribution of venture capital network and innovation performance.(3)Lead investor-Vnture relationship strength regulating the relationship between node composition,connection relationship and relationship distribution of venture capital network and the scale of R&D cooperation network.The research attempts to promote the integration of financial and innovation management research,and provides useful insights for investors to optimize investment strategies and formulate innovation strategies for ventures.It provides useful insights for investors to optimize investment strategies and for technologybased start-ups to carry out innovative activities.