CEO Demographic Characteristics, Empirical Research Into Innovation And Business Performance

SMEs have an important position in China’s economy, the investment in innovation is the key to obtain core competitiveness. Because of small-scale and simple structure, SMEs’management depends on the decision-maker. So it is significant to choose the right leaders for SMEs’innovation investment and performance improvemence.This paper summarized the current research about the CEO demographic characteristics theory, innovation investment and enterprise performance and then generalized two characteristics, which is risk and complexity, these two features require the CEO to have a higher risk appetite and management capabilities, so this paper analyzed the risk preference and management capabilities of CEO with different demographic characteristics. To illustrate the ideas that innovation investment is the CEO’s rational choice, this paper constructs game model to illustrate the inevitable choice of innovation investment for the CEO when considering the economic utility and social utility. Besides, the paper also selected153qualified samples of China’s Shenzhen GEM companies do the empirical analysis The empirical results show that the level of education and professional background of CEO promote investment performance and enterprise performance, while age, career experience and overseas experience have no obvious impact. When it comes to the influence of innovation investment on enterprise performance, the ratio of spending on R&D to main business income is positive, while the number of patents has no obvious effect, implying the insufficient use of patents. In order to examine whether the investment in innovation is the intermediary role, this paper did a intermediary detection. the result showed that it is the intermediary role between the CEO’s level of education and corporate performance as well as the professional background and Enterprise Performance mediating variables.The above results demonstrate the significance of innovation investment in the development of SMEs, investment in R&D can help to improve SMEs’performance. The results also provide references and suggestions for SEMs to find the right CEO.