Studies in Science of Science ›› 2025, Vol. 43 ›› Issue (1): 91-102.

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A Study on the Knowledge Spillover Effect of Enterprise Basic Research

  

  • Received:2023-08-30 Revised:2023-10-03 Online:2025-01-15 Published:2025-01-15

企业基础研究的知识溢出效应研究

孟巧爽1,李乐逸1,王艺萌1,2   

  1. 1. 大连理工大学经济管理学院
    2.
  • 通讯作者: 孟巧爽
  • 基金资助:
    国家自然科学基金青年项目;2022年辽宁省哲学社会科学青年人才培养对象委托课题

Abstract: Enterprise basic research on enterprises is an important cornerstone of the construction of a technological country, which helps to promote the deep integration of scientific research and industrial development. Compared with developed countries, there exist a lack of basic research investment in Chinese enterprise. To improve enterprise’s investment in basic research is vital for indigenous innovation in China. Based on the perspective of knowledge spillover, this study constructs the correlation data between science publication and patent science citations of Chinese manufacturing listed companies from 2000 to 2022, exploring the knowledge spillover mechanism of enterprise technology literature on focal enterprise patents and on competitive enterprise patents. We suggest that basic research can be viewed as the input of applied research and development. However, knowledge spillover may result in incentive distortion of enterprise’s basic research investment. By distinguishing knowledge internal use and knowledge spill-out, we study the incentives, mechanisms and market effect of Chinese enterprise’s basic research. The sample of the research is listed manufacturing enterprises in China’s A share stock market. We use the enterprises which has at least one year of positive R&D investment and at least one patent application. This gives us a non-balanced panel of 29247 firm-year observations with 2902 unique firms. Patent data is from Incopat database. Publication data is from CNKI database. Financial data is from CSMAR database. We match data from different databases. To identify the relationship between patent citations in enterprise basic research publications, first, 186148 patents with scientific citations were obtained after cleaning the original 1.8 million patents. Considering the situation where multiple patents refer to the same scientific literature, the original information of cited scientific literature was ultimately cleaned out. Secondly, considering that there may be some errors in the titles of scientific papers in CNKI and Incopat databases, fuzzy matching was performed on the title of articles and patent cited scientific literature in CNKI. Using Natural Language Processing (NPL) and Python_ Gensim library, we calculate the similarity between two database paper name strings. Using jieba word segmentation on the literature title strings of the two datasets, we construct an index dictionary of corpus features, and use a word bag model to construct a similarity matrix for fuzzy matching. We use twoway fixed effect model in our empirical research. Research findings are: (1) Knowledge internal use promotes focal enterprises to conduct basic research, while knowledge spill-out decreases focal enterprises from conducting basic research. (2) The citation of competitive enterprise patents to focal enterprise science literature can help improve the innovation performance of focal enterprises. (3) Compared with knowledge internal use, knowledge spill-out in basic research significantly decrease the financial performance of the focus enterprises. Robustness checks using Heckman model gain the same results. Heterogeneity test indicates that knowledge spillovers has a more significant impact on the basic research of non-state-owned enterprises. Basic research knowledge internal use promotes the applied research of high-tech industries and small-scale enterprises, while basic research knowledge spill-out promotes the applied research of non-state-owned enterprises and large-scale enterprises. This article reveals the incentives, spillover mechanisms, and market effects of Chinese enterprise basic research. The conclusions provide policy implications for consolidating the important position of enterprises in scientific and technological innovation, and guiding the deep integration of basic research and applied research.

摘要: 企业基础研究是科技强国建设的重要基石,有助于推动科学研究与产业的深度融合。基于知识溢出视角,构建2000-2022年中国制造业上市公司科技文献与专利科技引文关联数据,探究企业科技文献对焦点企业专利的知识内溢机制和对竞争企业专利的知识外溢机制。研究发现:(1)知识内溢促进焦点企业开展基础研究、知识外溢抑制焦点企业开展基础研究。(2)竞争企业专利对焦点企业科技文献的引用,有助于提升焦点企业专利数量。(3)与知识内溢相比,基础研究的知识外溢显著地抑制了焦点企业的财务绩效。异质性检验表明,知识溢出对非国有企业基础研究影响更明显。基础研究知识内溢促进高技术行业、低规模企业的应用研究,基础研究知识外溢促进非国有企业、高规模企业的应用研究。研究揭示企业基础研究的投入动机、溢出机制及市场效应,研究结论为夯实企业创新主体地位,引导基础研究、应用研究深度融合提供政策参考。