| Technological innovation is an important way to enhance the competitiveness of enterprises and achieve sustainable development.It is also an important means to implement manufacturing power strategy and promote industrial transformation and upgrading.Collaborative innovation has the advantage of being able to share R&D costs,reduce R&D risks,and create synergies.However,the existence of cooperative opportunistic risks also restricts the willingness and enthusiasm of enterprises to collaborative innovation.Scholars have proposed two mechanisms for the problem,trust-based governance and contractual governance.The research on trust-based governance mainly focuses on the level of social trust or personal relationship network.However,there is little discussion on the level of corporate trust.Since corporate social responsibility is a good representative of its social capital,and corporate social capital helps to build trust and cooperation of stakeholders.Therefore,from the perspective of corporate trust,this paper studies the impact and mechanism of a firm’s corporate social responsibility performance on it’s participation in collaborative innovation under the legal environment in China.We conducts an empirical study to verify our research hypothesis by using data on enterprises taken from the World Bank’s 2012 China Enterprise Survey.We use the sum of supplier social responsibility,customer social responsibility and employee social responsibility to express corporate social responsibility,use whether to participate in collaborative R&D and the collaborative R&D expenditures to represent the company’s collaborative innovation behavior.A probit model and a tobit model are applied to investigate the influence of corporate social responsibility on collaborative innovation decision and collaborative innovation expenditures.At the same time,we classify the sources of trust and verify the impact of different signals of corporate social responsibility on collaborative innovation behavior.Finally,we also consider the impact of corporate social responsibility on collaborative innovation under different trust environments and legal environments,and the impact of corporate social responsibility on different collaborative innovation modes.The results show that:(1)Corporate social responsibility forms corporate trust,positively affects the collaborative innovation decision and collaborative innovation expenditures;(2)Corporate social responsibility promotes participation of collaborative innovation through integrity-based signal,benevolence-based signal and ability-based signal;(3)In areas with poor social trust environment,corporate social responsibility is more easily recognized by partners,thus strengthening the role in promoting collaborative innovation;(4)Trust-based governance has a substitution effect on the contract governance in the process of collaborative innovation.In areas with poor legal system environment,the positive effect of corporate social responsibility performance on corporate collaborative innovation is strengthened;(5)Corporate social responsibility has a significant role in promoting product collaborative innovation and process collaborative innovation.The above conclusions provide a possible way for enterprises to build trust and improve innovation efficiency,and also seek some new ideas for local governments to encourage innovation. |
