Product Market Competition And Firm Innovation Efficiency: Empirical Evidence And Mechanism Analysis

At present,innovation is the primary driving force for economic development,and Chinese economy and society have entered a new phase of high quality development.The construction of a normalized economic system led by science and technology innovation provides unprecedented development opportunities for enterprise manufacturing and innovation,and also poses many challenges and market competition for enterprises to accelerate the construction of an innovative economic system.How to further stimulate the innovation vitality of enterprises,enhance their independent innovation ability and improve their innovation efficiency is an urgent topic that needs to be addressed and studied in depth in the midst of China’s technological revolution.The report of the 20 th Party Congress clearly puts forward the strategic assertion that we should comprehensively implement the concept of innovation and development,open up new fields,cultivate new dynamics and sustain new advantages.Enterprise innovation is a typical open system that is influenced by variables in the external environment.Therefore,product market competition,as the basic context for enterprises to participate in market activities,is inevitably closely related to enterprise innovation.Existing studies mainly examine the correlation between product market competition and enterprise innovation from the dimension of innovation input,and do not touch deeply on the dimension of innovation efficiency.This thesis attempts to take enterprise innovation efficiency as an entry point to study the relationship between product market competition and enterprise innovation efficiency,and selectively analyze enterprise innovation efficiency based on innovation conditions by enterprise property rights,asset size and intellectual property protection level.The thesis further investigates the mechanism of product market competition affecting the innovation efficiency of listed enterprises.This thesis uses the data of Chinese A-share listed enterprises from 2010 to 2020 as a research sample to systematically test the influence relationship between market competition and enterprise innovation efficiency and its mechanism of action.The following conclusions are finally drawn:(1)Using the effective conversion rate of innovation inputs to measure enterprise innovation efficiency,product market competition is positively related to enterprise innovation efficiency.(2)The promotion effect of product market competition on enterprise innovation efficiency has a selection effect based on the internal and external innovation conditions of enterprises,specifically the incentive effect of product market competition on the innovation efficiency of listed enterprises only exists significantly in private enterprises,enterprises with smaller asset size and enterprises in regions with lower level of intellectual property protection.(3)The results of the mechanism analysis indicate that product market competition significantly enhances enterprise innovation efficiency by mitigating the tendency of managers to be short-sighted and improving the information environment of enterprises.The incremental contributions of this thesis are mainly in the following areas: firstly,it empirically examines the relationship between product market competition and enterprise innovation efficiency and clarifies the possible paths of action,thus providing a new perspective on the transformation of firm innovation research from input to output.Secondly,it enriches and expands the research on firm innovation efficiency from the perspective of innovation condition,and clarifies the selective response of enterprise innovation efficiency to external product market competition under different innovation conditions.Thirdly,the findings provide guidance for firms to correctly understand product market competition from the perspective of innovation efficiency,and to realise the positive interaction and organic coordination between product competition and innovation decisions,external environment and internal development.