ZHUO Ran, DBA

Ran Zhuo has been in the financial industry since 2012 and has been engaged in financial investment work. Currently, he holds the position of supervisor in the risk management department of a financial asset management company, mainly responsible for the risk review and compliance management of investment projects.

He defended his Executive Doctorate of Business Administration (EDBA) in March 2025, on the theme “The Impact of Technology M&A and Venture Capital on the Innovation Performance of Chinese High-Tech Firms” under the supervision of Professor Vincent Chauvet, Professor at the University of Toulon, France.

Prof Chauvet Vincent

The impact of Technology M&A and venture capital on the innovation performance of Chinese high-tech firms

Under the background of national innovation strategy and building a new development pattern, promoting the iterative upgrading of industries, especially the innovation of high-tech enterprises mainly in strategic emerging industries, is the core element of realizing the national innovation-driven development strategy, and is an important way to realize the national high-quality development goal. In the face of the complex domestic and international situation, enterprises will inevitably encounter many difficulties and obstacles to independent innovation, and the active introduction of external resources has become an important means to promote the development and upgrading of enterprises. In recent years, Chinese high-tech enterprises not only adopt the strategy of technology mergers and acquisitions, but also actively utilize the opportunity of venture capital to deeply integrate internal and external resources, so as to make up for the lack of their own strength and technological deficiencies, and to achieve a major breakthrough in enterprise technology at relatively low cost in a short period of time to further enhance the enterprise R & D capability, and to lay a good foundation for the subsequent independent innovation. Therefore, the study of technology mergers and acquisitions and venture capital strategy for enterprises to carry out technological innovation is of great significance, through the above two strategies can enable enterprises to obtain a comprehensive enhancement of all factors, including capital, market, technology, management, etc. Technology mergers and acquisitions and venture capital has become an important way for high-tech enterprises to realize the bend and technological leapfrogging.
This paper takes high-tech enterprises engaged in strategic emerging industries as the research object, and according to the research vein of “strategy-capability-performance”, it gradually explores the influence effects of technology mergers and acquisitions and venture capital investment and reveals the intrinsic relationship between the two and the innovation performance of the enterprises respectively. The main issues discussed include the effect of technology M&A and venture capital on enterprise technological innovation, the intrinsic influence mechanism of technology M&A and venture capital on innovation performance, and the role of executive incentives in the process of technology M&A and venture capital on innovation performance, etc. Based on this, this paper adopts a quantitative analysis. Based on this, this paper adopts quantitative analysis to explore the above issues by constructing a regression model.
This paper takes the mergers and acquisitions of high-tech enterprises listed on the Chinese stock exchange from 2017 to 2021 as the research sample, and collects and organizes a total of 730 mergers and acquisitions through the platforms of Juchao Information Network and Guotaian Database. By applying the empirical analysis method, the following conclusions are obtained: (1)For high-tech enterprises, carrying out technology M&A does bring a significant impact on the innovation performance of the enterprise, but it will form a certain hindering effect in the short term. At the same time, it is difficult for technology mergers and acquisitions to have a significant impact on absorptive capacity in the short term. (2)Venture investment has a positive impact on the innovation performance of enterprises, and at the same time, it has a significant effect on the absorptive capacity of enterprises. (3) The absorptive capacity of high-tech enterprises has a significant positive impact on enhancing innovation performance. (4) Executive incentives have a positive impact on the innovation performance of enterprises, and at the same time, there is a homogeneous moderating effect on technology mergers and acquisitions. In response to the conclusions of the study, this paper puts forward management recommendations from the perspectives of enterprises and the government respectively.
The contribution of this paper lies in (1) expanding the research perspective of technology mergers and acquisitions and venture capital. In terms of the impact of technology mergers and acquisitions and venture capital on innovation performance, previous studies have mainly focused on the direct impact, and the research on the conduction mechanism and the impact path is not deep enough and clear enough. This paper focuses on the mediating factor-absorptive capacity of technology mergers and acquisitions and venture capital investment on innovation performance, which broadens the research boundary between resource introduction strategy and enterprise innovation management. (2) It enriches the research content of enterprise innovation management. The traditional mainstream research basically takes the relationship between technology mergers and acquisitions and innovation performance as the research perspective, this paper, on this basis, adds the independent variable of venture capital, as another external resource, the process of the impact of venture capital on innovation performance has been further studied. At the same time, this paper also introduces the important regulating variable of executive incentives to explore the regulating effect of executive incentives on the introduction of external resources, to make up for the shortcomings of the existing literature and theories, and to provide positive references for the innovation management of enterprises. However, there are some shortcomings in this study, as the samples are all from China and the number is not rich enough, and the depth of the study will be further expanded in the future.