关键词: 技术溢出, 资金流, 创新, 跨空间, 高新技术企业

Abstract:

With the advent of the era of the knowledge economy, innovation has become a significant engine of economic development. In this context, China has recently experienced dramatic economic restructuring with its vision to transform its growth pattern into a knowledge-driven development. Meanwhile, innovation becomes an increasingly crucial issue in the realm of economic geography. Economic geographers of related research have focused on the performance of knowledge externalities in specific spaces. In recent years, apart from geographical proximity, the concept of nongeographical proximity (e.g., organizational proximity, social proximity, institutional proximity, and cognitive proximity) has also attracted the attention of scholars. Either geographical proximity or non-geographical proximity, their essences are to increase the interaction between the shareholders and high-tech enterprises and then generate knowledge spillovers. With the assumption of the technology spillover also brought by non-geographical proximity, high-tech enterprises might be able to acquire new knowledge and expand the diversity of their knowledge bases from the frequent interactions with the shareholders. Furthermore, fewer researches had focused on the effect of shareholders’ technological level on firms’ innovation performance brought by the extra linkage built by investment from external shareholders. In order to unravel the relationship between shareholders’ technological level and high-tech enterprises’ innovation performance, this research collects data from the online databases, including Tencent location service (https://lbs.qq.com/tool/getpoint/index.html), National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System (http://www.gsxt.gov.cn/index.html) and Qichacha (http://www.gsxt.gov.cn/index.html). By utilizing the data of 794 high-tech enterprises located in national high-tech industrial parks as samples, this article estimates the effect of shareholders’ technological level on innovation in the high-tech enterprise with a Tobit model within the framework of the knowledge production function. Based on the empirical evidence, this article proposes the three following findings: First, the average distance between the first shareholder and high-tech enterprise is 288 km. The shareholders are mainly distributed in the three core metropolitan regions (i.e., the Bohai Rim region, the Yangtze River Delta region and the Pearl River Delta region) in eastern China, and capital flows are mainly among or between these regions. Second, the shareholders’ technological level has a positive effect on improving enterprise innovation performance which is measured by the number of patents and software, because the investment behavior is conducive to enhance the convenience of technological interaction between shareholders and the high-tech enterprises. Third, the analysis of the technology spillover mechanism: the investment behavior lowers the threshold of interaction between the innovation subjects, and the technology spillover is realized through the establishment of a smooth flow of knowledge talents and a lower threshold for R&D cooperation. Finally, the article further affirms that capital flows can break through the spatial boundary and bring technology spillover, which provides a new way to facilitate the technology learning process of high-tech enterprises. Also, the following suggestions are put: With its limitation of attracting high-tech enterprises, local government can encourage local enterprises to introduce investment from enterprises with high technological level for promoting their innovation performance.

Key words: technology spillover, capital flows, innovation, above region, high-tech enterprise