Analysis Of The Effect Of Age On Innovation

The 18 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China emphasized that scientific and technological innovation is a strategic support for improving aggregate productivity and comprehensive national capacity,and must be placed at the core of the overall national development.Innovation is the main driving force for the development of social progress,but now,in an aging society,it is worth paying attention to the problem that whether ageing has a negative impact on innovation.Some scholars believe that aging has a negative impact on innovation,and some difference voices suggest that as the age increases,the impact on innovation is positive at first,and then become negative.But the existing literatures don't study the impact of company age on its innovation,in this context,this paper studies the impact of age on the innovation of companies and inventors.Firstly,I review the domestic and foreign literatures on the impact of age on innovation of inventors,companies,industries and countries,and introduce the relevant theories of age and innovation.According to the theory of neurology,the optimal age for inventors to innovate is 25 to 45.According to the learning mechanism of the company by Jovanovic(1982),it can be inferred that the age of the company has a negative impact on innovation.According to the literature and theory,I have the hypothesis that as the company ages,the company's innovation ability weakens,and the company is more likely to invest in its original industry rather than in the new industry.Subsequently,I construct an econometric model and verify the hypothesis from an empirical perspective.The data from the Patent Data Project(PDP)and the COMPUSTAT database,I obtained the US patent data from 1980 to 2005,and empirically investigate the impact of age on innovation.In addition,I considered the impact of the age of employees on the innovation of the company at the company level.The dependent variable of the model is innovation rate at inventor or firm level.For the innovation of inventor,I construct an innovation index.For the measurement of the firm level innovation rate,I calculate the company's annual growth rate of the number of patent and decompose the growth rate into the patent growth rate of the new industry and the patent growth rate of the original industry.The independent variable of the model is age,and the base period of age is calculated based on the year in which the patent of company was first obtained or the patent of inventor was first applied.The inventor models consider the historical patent stock of the inventor,the age and R&D of the company which the inventor works for,and the inventor's fixed effect,time fixed effect,and the fixed effect of the state and industry.The company models also consider the effects of historical patent stock,the number of industries involved,asset size,employment,R&D,and the company's fixed effect,time fixed effect,and the fixed effect of the industry.In addition,on the basis of the company model,I considered the influence of the average age of the inventors of the company on the innovation of the company.Finally,the robustness of the results of the company model is tested by examining the quality of patents.The results of regression models show that as the company ages,the total patent growth rate decreases,and the patent growth rate of new industry is consistent with the trend of total patent growth rate,while the patent growth rate of original industry gradually increases.The margin is smaller than the decrease in the patent growth rate of new industries.I can draw conclusions as following: For inventors,as they become older,their creativity increases firstly and then decreases.In empirical studies,model results show that the peak age is around 19.The base period of the inventor's age is the year when he/she create the first patented,so age is actually the number of years an inventor has been engaged in invention.Assuming that the inventor has been engaged in R&D activities since the age of 20,the peak is around 39 years of age,as the findings of other scholars.For the company,as the age increases,the company's overall innovation ability weakens,and the company is more likely to invest in innovation research in the original industry,and innovation research in the new industry weakens.The research on the original industry is slowly increasing,but the scope of the decline in the exploration of new industries is greater than the increase in the original industry,thus causing the overall innovation of the company to decline.After considering the average age of the inventors of the company,the conclusions are still consistent.As the company grows,it has a clearer understanding of its innovation ability in the industries.If it's a high innovation ability company in the industry,it will focus on this industry and reducing innovation for new industries.It can be speculated that as the company develops in an industry with high innovation ability,it only needs to make a small amount of innovation to maintain a certain industry position and market share,and there is not enough motivation to conduct more innovation research.Therefore,the company total innovation activity has decreased.The innovation point of this article lies in the research area and the innovation of index construction.Most of the literatures focuses on the analysis of the impact of firm size and R&D on innovation,and there is less research on the impact of company age on innovation.In addition,I also propose new methods on how to measure innovation.The shortcoming of this article is that the average age of the inventors of the company is not a good variable of their age structure;besides,patents are not distinguished into progressive innovation and fundamental innovation.What's more,I don't distinguish different industries.