The Influence Of Regional And Industrial Innovation Environment On Firm R&D

At present, our country is in the implementation of the strategy of innovation driven development, and our government and enterprises are paying more and more attention to research and innovation, and increasing the investment in research and development(R&D) constantly. How to create a good environment for enterprise innovation, and to promote the enterprise to truly become the main R&D subject are problems which need to be solved urgently by the central and local government. However, the present situation of our country is that differences of innovation environment between different areas and industriesare very obvious, and then the study of impact of regional orindustrial innovation environment on firm R&D activities is particularly important. On the other hand, in the academic circle, related research on the relationship between regional or industrial innovation environment and the firm R&D activities are constantly emerging, related literatures are just an immense number of books, but so far the problem about the multilevel relationship between innovation environment and firm R&D activities did not cause the corresponding attention of the academic circles, and there are few in-depth research on these issues. This makes us can not to clarify or reveal the mechanism of the effect of the innovation environment factors on firm R&D activities.In such a case, fistly, this paper has carried on the summary to the multi-level theory perspectives of different disciplines, and on the basis of the existing researches, adopts the view of multilevel research to theoretically analyze the relationship between the innovation environment and firm R&D activities, treating the regional innovation environment and industrial innovation environment as the focus on the object. Then, on the basis of theoretical analysis, this paper takes our country enterprise data, regional data, and industry data of listed companies in 2008-2012 as the research sample, using the stochastic frontier model, multilevel model and other research methods, identifies the simple nested relations in multilevel nested relations and the interactive nested relations. Through theoretical analysis and empirical test, we draw the following conclusions:(1)In the aspect of theory analysis, regional innovation environment and industrial innovation environmentis the enterprise external macro environment, in the matter of firm R&D activities, which has the level difference with the enterprise’s internal micro environment. The relationship between enterprise internal innovation environment of firm R&D activities, regional innovation environment, and industrial innovation environment, can be abstracted into a conceptual model of multilevel nested relation, namely the firm R&D activities are nested in the enterprise internal micro innovation environment, while the enterprise internal micro innovation environment is nested in the enterprise external macro innovation environment. According to the number of dimensions of the external innovation environment, the multilevel nested relations can be further divided into simple nested relations from a single dimension(such as regional or industrial dimension) and interactive nested relations from more than one dimension(such as regional dimension and industrial dimension). The simple nested relations between external innovation environment of enterprises and firm R&D activities include the two basic forms of cross-layer direct exchange relationship and cross-layer indirect exchange relationship. And the basic roles of interactive nested relations between external innovation environment of enterprises(such as regional innovation environment and industrial innovation environment) and firm R&D activities include the direct regulation and the indirect regulation.(2)In the aspect of empirical study, the firm R&D activity variables as the enterprise R&D input, R&D output and R&D efficiency and the enterprise internal innovation environment variables have many non negligible differences in the regional level or industrial level. The relationship between the firm R&D activity variables as the firm R&D input, R&D output and R&D efficiency and the enterprise internal financing variablesis affected remarkably by the regional or industrial innovation environment factors. The regional market structure, regional fiscal policy, the regional overall economic situation of specific regional innovation environmentand industry market structure, industry operating profit rate, industry financial support of specific industrial innovation environment, and there exist cross-layer direct of indirect exchange relationships between the above factors and firm R&D activities. Then the simple nested relationship between regional(or industrial innovation) environment and firm R&D activities was verified. Provincial regional innovation environments such as the regional market structure, regional fiscal policy, the regional overall economic situation have direct or indirect significant regulatory effects on large class of industrial innovation environments such as industry market structure, industry operating profit rate, industry financial supporting. At the same time, large class of industrial innovation environment also has a direct or indirect effect on municipal regional innovation environment, and then the interactive nested relationship between “regional-industrial” innovation environment and firm R&D activities had be verified.The main innovation points of this paper are as the follows:(1) In the existing research, scholars have not considered or given preliminarily definiing the difference in the level of firm external environment(macro environment) for firm innovation and firm internal environment(micro environment) for firm innovation, without concretely analyzed the multilevel structure of the innovation environment. And this makes us unable to clearly understand the mechanism of the effect of the multi-level external innovation environment on firm R&D activity. Under this background, we review to study the multilevel nested relation between innovation environment and firm R&D activities. As discussed the concept of level and dimension of the innovation environment, we proposed the theoretical point of multilevel nested relation between innovation environment and firm R&D activities, and abstracted as the conceptual model. This paper enriched the results of the research field on the relationship between innovation environment and firm R&D activity, and it is an important and beneficial supplement for the existing research.(2) Using the multilevel perspective, we cleared the simple nested relations between regional(or industrial) innovation environment and firm R&D activities, deepening the understanding of the existing research on the effect of regional(or industrial) innovation environment factors on firm R&D activities. In the existing related research, scholars generally treated regional(or industrial) innovation environment factors as the same as internal micro environment factors, which ignoring the effect of region(or industry) in the firm R&D activity, namely in the data processing the assumption homogeneous and IID of dependent variable did not meet. Different with existing research, this paper used the method of multilevel model, with coefficient of the micro level independent as the macro level dependent variable, and with coefficient of the micro level independent as stochastic effects. We focus on sdutying the influences of the regional(or industrial) innovation environment factors directly affecting on firm R&D activities and the regional(or industrial) innovation environment factors through the enterprise internal innovation environment factors affecting on firm R&D activities, while overcoming the weakness of the dependent variable being not homogeneous and non IID disorders.(3) Using multilevel perspective, this paper studies the interactive nested relations between the “regional-industrial” innovation environment and firm R&D activities, and use the interactive multilevel models to do the empirical research, to a certain extent revealing the mechanism and path of that the complicated environmental factors of different levels and dimensions playing a role in firm R&D activities. And interactive nested relations emphasized the mutual regulatory role of different dimensions of multilevel structural innovation environment. Existing research on the influencing factors of enterprise R&D activities, most scholars were to study a certain class of the influence of innovation environment on firm R&D activities(regional or industrial innovation environment), without considering the interaction of two classes of innovation environment. This sduty has enriched the empirical research results about the relationship between the innovation environment and firm R&D, which will make certain reference significance to the related research in the field of innovation environment.