Selective Incentive or Function Construction?Government Innovation Policy and Strategic Catering of Enterprises
In the current economic landscape,government innovation incentive policies play a pivotal role.They are aimed at fostering corporate innovation,accelerating economic growth,and enhancing national competitiveness.In theory,these policies should serve as effective instruments for igniting innovation.However,a key issue that arises in practice is that firms often engage in strategic conformity to meet the superficial requirements of policies,thus gaining policy divi-dends.This practice may lead to distortions in policy effectiveness,not only wasting valuable innovation resources but also potentially undermining the overall efficacy of the policies.The emergence of strategic catering is a complex outcome of policy design and implementation.Government innova-tion incentive policies typically require a delicate balance of multiple objectives to support various types and scales of enter-prises while addressing diverse economic and societal demands.This provides opportunities for firms to cater,exploiting the incompleteness of policies to pursue their own interests.In response to these policies,firms may adopt adaptive strategies to meet superficial policy requirements,rather than committing to substantive innovation activities.Thus,the study delves into the nature,motivation,and potential impact of corporate strategic conformity behavior in the context of China's industrial policy environment.Text analysis techniques were employed to analyze innovation-related textual information in corporate annual reports to quantify corporate strategic catering behavior.Specifically,an identification mechanism encompassing two dimensions was designed:innovation information disclosure levels and the quality of innovation implementation.Strategic catering involves"embellishing"innovation performance with lower levels of innovation output,such as low-knowledge-content patents like utility models.The alignment of a firm's innovation performance with its innovation information disclosure level was as-sessed by analyzing its patent application activities.If a firm"talks more than it does"in terms of innovation,reflecting a speculative tendency in its innovation activities,it is considered to exhibit strategic cater behavior.The findings indicate that both selective and functional innovation incentive policies positively impact corporate innova-tion output.While selective incentives encourage a form of compliance that ostensibly meets policy requirements,they para-doxically intensify strategic catering behaviors that undermine genuine innovation.Conversely,functional incentives signifi-cantly reduce such behaviors.Moreover,the presence of these catering behaviors dilutes the effectiveness of selective incen-tives,causing a deviation from intended policy outcomes.Further analysis reveals that firms engaging in strategic catering are more likely to exhibit regulatory violations and seek political connections to gain undue advantages.
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
