The Complementary Effect of R&D Investment and Human Capital on Enterprise Innovation Performance

Yimin Gu

《World Scientific Research Journal》 8卷2期 (2022/02) Pp. 200-210

https://doi.org/10.6911/WSRJ.202202_8(2).0029

摘要

As an important subject of technological innovation, the R&D activities of enterprises are characterized by complexity, risk, and high cost. The entire process requires the coordination of multiple production factors. Starting from the two elements of capital and manpower, this paper studies whether the company's innovation performance will be affected by the interaction of R&D investment and human capital. This paper constructs a two-way fixed-effect model, using the detailed classification data of R&D investment, employment structure and patent data of listed companies from 2010 to 2019 to test the relationship between R&D investment, human capital and corporate innovation performance. The results show that the increase in R&D investment has significantly improved the innovation performance of enterprises, no matter in absolute or relative amount. The level of human capital of an enterprise is measured by the level of academic qualifications and technology, and it is found that the improvement of human capital has significantly improved the innovation performance of the enterprise. In addition, this article further finds that R&D investment and human capital have complementary effects on corporate performance innovation, and the combination of the two elements has an additional role in promoting corporate innovation. Finally, this paper also studies the heterogeneity of complementary effects, and finds that the complementary effects of R&D investment and human capital have certain heterogeneity in the types of industrial technology and the types of enterprise factor endowments. The research in this paper verifies the ＂complementary effect＂ of capital and skilled labor from the micro-enterprise perspective, and puts forward suggestions that enterprises need to allocate factor resources reasonably and optimize resource utilization efficiency in order to improve enterprise innovation performance.

關鍵字

R&D investment ； Human capital ； Complementary effects ； Innovation performance

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