Does Layout of Whole Industrial Chain Increase the Innovation Output of Firms?
Promoting autonomous innovation and original innovation,advancing the construction of an innovative country,has become one of the key tasks in China's national strategic layout.President Xi Jinping has emphasized,"It is necessary to deploy innovation chains around industrial chains and layout industrial chains around innovation chains,to take bigger steps in promoting high-quality economic development."Under this strategic guidance,utilizing the role of industrial chains in driving the engineering and application of innovation outcomes,have become crucial in advancing the construction of an innovative country and achieving high-quality economic development.From a micro perspective,the key to the integration of industrial and innovation chains is to establish the central role of firms.The layout of whole industrial chain,as a crucial foundation for business competition and development,has been widely applied in commercial practice and exerts a significant impact on corporate innovation.Therefore,exploring how firms can effectively position themselves within the industrial chain and fully leverage the layout of whole industrial chain to enhance their innovation output has become an important research topic.Based on manually collected and organized data of long-term equity investments in China's A-share listed firms,combined with multi-source information,including large-scale industrial and commercial firm data and Tianyancha platform data,this paper utilizes Python web scraping techniques to construct indicators that reflect the layout of whole industrial chain.On this basis,this paper systematically examines the effects of the layout of whole industrial chain on corporate innovation output and its internal mechanism.The study finds that the layout of the whole industrial chain significantly enhances corporate innovation output.Mechanism testing indicates that the layout of the whole industrial chain primarily promotes corporate innovation output by expanding the scope of resources and optimizing resource integration capability.In addition,leading companies play a more important role in the layout of whole industrial chain.The paper also finds that firms with lower agency costs and less financing constraints have better innovation outcomes in implementing the layout of whole industrial chain.The main contributions of this paper are as follows:First,existing research on the relationship between firm boundaries and innovation output has mainly focused on the impact of mergers and acquisitions on innovation output,while studies on the impact of different motives,scopes,and forms of firm boundaries on innovation output are scarce.This paper,by focusing on the increasingly important firm boundary of the layout of whole industrial chain,responds to the academic community's attention to seeking innovation through adjusting firm boundaries,thus enriching the research field of factors influencing corporate innovation.Second,current research on the consequences of vertical integration is relatively limited and mainly focuses on corporate operational or financial performance,this paper extends the range of this field from the perspective of innovation output.Finally,the conclusions of this paper have strong practical significance.The paper points out that the layout of whole industrial chain is one of the important practices at the firm level to promote the deep integration of industrial chains with innovation chains.Therefore,fully leveraging the role of the layout of whole industrial chain in innovation-driven development is key to achieving the precise docking and deep integration of industrial chains with innovation chains,and promoting the construction of an innovative country.
layout of whole industrial chainscope of resourcesresource integration capabilityinnovation output