Effects Of Entrepreneurs' Heterogeneity Characteristics And Risk Preference On Corporate Innovation

Under the background of increasingly competitive globalization and rapid development of science and technology,innovation plays an increasingly prominent role for enterprises in enhancing the core competitiveness and prompting the future development.From the perspective of input and output measure,R&D input and the number of research staff reflect the extent of innovation input,in the meantime,the number of patents and new products are used as indicators of corporate innovation output.Besides,factors such as enterprise scale,survival period,performance,asset liability ratio,entrepreneur's shareholding ratio,export situation,to a certain extent,will affect corporate innovation.However,the implementation of corporate innovation is eventually decided by entrepreneur who is the behavior subject determining whether the enterprise conducts initiatives.As the top leader,entrepreneur undertakes the important mission of the enterprise's strategy formulation and decision-making such as whether involving in innovation activities with high risk and extreme uncertainty.Therefore,this dissertation attempts to analyze the impact of different entrepreneurial characteristics on enterprise innovation from the perspective of entrepreneurs,so as to provide new ideas for enhancing enterprise innovation.In the research of this dissertation,Bounded Rationality Theory,Upper Echelons Theory and Resource-Based Theory become the theoretical basis.Schumpeter's Innovation Theory highlights the significance of innovation in promoting economic and social development,as a result,corporate innovation has become the driving force of corporate development and social progress,meanwhile,entrepreneurship has become the source of promoting corporate innovation.As the top leader of management staff,entrepreneur takes operating and managing as the primary responsibility,which is of great significance to corporate innovation and strategic planning.Although research on the definition and behavior of the entrepreneur is time-honored,as the essential attribute of the entrepreneur,"people" is the highly abstract concept that is hard to observe and measure by quantitative research.Since the proposal of Upper Echelons Theory,demographic characteristics such as age,gender,nationality etc.are included in the study framework,which,to a certain extent,reflects entrepreneur's cognitive ability and values.Due to its observation and measurability,these index are widely used as substitute variables of entrepreneurial characteristics.However,proposal and analysis of Upper Echelons Theory is based on Western culture and economy,concerning on the senior management team as the research object,exploring the relationship between demographic characteristics of senior management team and corporate strategic choice or performance.Under the background of Chinese socialist cultural and economic environment,whether heterogeneity in individual characteristics of entrepreneurs has influence on corporate innovation still needs to be further studied and verified.In this dissertation,we will discuss the influence of entrepreneur heterogeneity on corporate innovation.First,we briefly introduce the basic theories related to this research topic,and review the relevant literature from home and abroad.Based on a clear definition of the concept of entrepreneur,heterogeneity and so on,we summarize basic views of the existing research about the effect of entrepreneur heterogeneity on corporate innovation,introducing entrepreneur's risk preference as an intermediary variable,thus establishing the research system of this dissertation.Secondly,based on the mature research method from existing research,we build the theoretical model of entrepreneur heterogeneity influencing corporate innovation,and put forward related hypotheses according to the literature.Finally,we adopt method of empirical analysis and robustness test using first-hand data from a large-scale investigation.Empirical results show that:(1)entrepreneurial-level variables such as age and education have significant influence on corporate innovation,moreover,entrepreneurial age negatively affect corporate innovation and entrepreneurial education have markedly positive impact,whereas,entrepreneurial gender and tenure have no obvious influence on corporate innovation;(2)entrepreneur's risk preference plays the mediating role in the relationship between entrepreneur heterogeneity and corporate innovation,when risk preference is stronger,the effect of entrepreneurial age on corporate innovation is smaller,by the contrast,the effect of entrepreneurial education on corporate innovation is more obvious,which shows that risk preference can affect the relationship between entrepreneur heterogeneity and corporate innovation;(3)control variables such as enterprise scale,entrepreneur's shareholding ratio have obviously positive implication on corporate innovation,while other control variables,including indicators such as export situation,survival period,asset liability ratio have no significant impact on corporate innovation.Through empirical analysis,this dissertation further validates and enriches the Upper Echelons Theory,confirming that there actually exists certain correlation between entrepreneur heterogeneity and corporate innovation in which process entrepreneur's risk preference plays the mediating role.This study provides the new diversity for the issue about entrepreneur heterogeneity and corporate innovation,and demonstrates the existing research findings from the empirical point of view,which has certain practical significance.