Financial Flexibility,R&D Investment And Enterprise Innovation Performance

In 2008 after the outbreak of the international financial crisis,the economic recovery is fragile,the downturn in the global trade and investment between China and America trade frictions escalating,geopolitical risks,developed and emerging economies recovery differentiation,instability and uncertainty and risk accumulation,also showed "new normal" economy development,these factors led to increasingly complex business environment.In order to cope with and reduce the operating risks brought by the uncertainty of the operating environment,enterprises use financial management to reserve the strategy of financial flexibility has been paid more and more attention.Financial flexibility can help enterprises cope with the unexpected capital demand brought by future uncertain events,timely obtain and mobilize internal and external funds at a reasonable price to seize powerful investment opportunities,and realize the ability of enterprise value maximization.The more complex the business environment is,the more uncertain the factors are,the more financial flexibility can play a role in seizing investment opportunities and reducing financial risks.At the same time,the higher the business risk brought by environmental uncertainty and the fiercer the market competition,the more necessary it is to improve its own innovation ability and competitiveness.In today’s increasingly fierce competition among enterprises,in order to adapt to the trend of the development of the economic tide,in the increasingly fierce competition environment to win a place,enterprises in addition to marketing strategy to invest more energy,more important is to continue to increase investment in scientific research,improve the core competitiveness of its products,which is the key to the development of enterprises.The development of China’s capital market is relatively backward,when enterprises need to invest a lot of money to carry out innovation,it is difficult to obtain the needed funds from the capital market with a fair price.When an enterprise reserves enough financial flexibility,it can use internal and external funds to seize favorable investment opportunities and meet the demand for innovation and R&D funds.At the same time,the increase of R&D investment can also improve the innovation performance of the enterprise.Therefore,enterprises reserve financial flexibility,on the one hand,to help enterprises reduce financial risks and operational risks,on the other hand,to help enterprises find favorable innovation opportunities,have sufficient funds to invest in research and development,so as to improve the innovation performance of enterprises.To sum up,innovation is crucial to enterprises,and financial flexibility can maintain financial flexibility and support a large amount of capital needed for innovation investment activities.Can it be concluded that the reserve of financial flexibility can improve the innovation performance of enterprises? This paper empirically analyzes the impact of financial flexibility on R&D investment and innovation performance of enterprises,which provides a reference for the decision of the level of financial flexibility reserve of enterprises.In this paper,4766 valid data of GEM listed companies from 2010 to 2019 are selected from Wind database and Guotaian database as samples to empirically analyze the impact of financial flexibility on the innovation performance of GEM listed companies and the mediating role of R&D investment in the relationship between financial flexibility and corporate innovation performance.The results show that,first,there is a positive linear correlation between financial flexibility and R&D investment,that is,the reserve of financial flexibility has a very positive impact on the improvement of R&D investment by GEM enterprises;Second,the relationship between financial flexibility and innovation performance is "inverted U-shaped",that is,with the increase of financial flexibility,the innovation performance of enterprises increases first and then decreases.Therefore,enterprises should maintain the optimal financial flexibility to achieve the optimal innovation performance.Third,R&D investment has a partial mediating effect on the relationship between financial flexibility and firm innovation performance.Fourthly,the group study of listed companies according to the property right nature shows that the influence of financial flexibility on R&D investment and innovation performance of enterprises is greater in non-state-owned enterprises than in state-owned enterprises.