Research On The Influence Of CEO Knowledge Endowment On Firm Growth In Hi-tech Startups

Under the background of knowledge economy,knowledge has become an important strategic resource for enterprises to realize exploratory innovation.CEO’s excellent work experience,cognitive ability,thinking mode and other accumulated knowledge is essential to enhance the ability of exploratory innovation.Exploratory innovation as an important branch of innovation activities,laying a solid foundation for promoting the implementation of innovation driven development strategy.According to exploratory innovation,high-tech enterprises not only improve business performance,increase market share,but also take advantage of the competitive position in the fierce market competition,provide strong support for the further stable and healthy growth.At present,China’s high-tech enterprises facing the problems of insufficiency of exploratory innovation ability,unreasonable of resources allocation,hindering the growth of enterprises.At the same time,it is not clear that the existing theory on the different characteristics of the knowledge how to influence the internal mechanism of exploratory innovation,leading to scholars lack of understanding of the relationship between CEO knowledge endowment,exploratory innovation and enterprise growth.In this paper,we use theoretical analysis and empirical testing to test the hypothesis.First of all,according to collate and review the domestic and foreign literature,defines the core concepts and related theory;and then,based on the core idea of knowledge based view,upper echelons theory,innovation theory,enterprise growth theory and resource dependence theory,analyzing the relationship between CEO endowment and enterprise growth,constructing the theoretical research framework of knowledge endowment effect of CEO on the growth of enterprises,and proposing the research hypothesis;finally,selecting 140high-tech startups of China’s GEM as research sample,testing the influence of the CEO knowledge endowment on enterprise growth.The study confirmed that CEO tenure,outputting function background and industry background have significant positive relationship with enterprise growth;exploratory innovation plays a partial mediating role between CEO knowledge endowment and enterprise growth;in addition,board social network positively moderates the relationship between CEO tenure and industry background with exploratory innovation.