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| Environmental Technology Diversification And Green Start-Up Creation: The Perspective of Technological Structure Upgrading |
| Dong Shan 1,2,Gong Hong 1,3 |
| (1. Economics and Management School of Wuhan University; 2. Research Center for China Industry-University-Research Institute Collaboration at Wuhan University;3. Research Center of Strategic Emerging Industries of Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China) |
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Abstract Green start-ups are currently regarded as a key instrument in solving environmental issues, but they are difficult to come into existence due to the dual restrictions of environmental externalities and liability of newness. Exploring the driving forces of green start-ups has always been an important issue in the field of innovation and entrepreneurship. In recent years, the birth and development of the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship (KSTE) has provided new ideas for the foundation of green start-ups. The implementation of empirical analyses on the creation of new firms through the lens of KSTE has pointed out that new environmental technologies are the main source of entrepreneurial opportunity in the low carbon economy transition. However, the existing research mainly analyzes the mechanism of environmental technology scale on the foundation of green start-ups, and also makes a differentiation analysis on different types of technologies (dirty technologies and clean technologies; university environmental technologies, research institute environmental technologies and firm environmental technologies) or start-ups (green start-ups, brown start-ups and gray start-ups; green start-ups and non-green start-ups), but it has not yet been able to reveal the mechanism of environmental technology structure on the foundation of green start-ups. Compared with technological scale, technological structure is more critical in driving innovation growth. It can be seen that the role of a single technology is limited, and a technology library without global deployment is like a mess of sand. Optimizing the technical structure and layout is the key to promoting the country's long-term development.#br#Therefore, this paper divides environmental technology diversification into two modes of related environmental technology diversification and unrelated environmental technology diversification, and explores the mechanisms of environmental technology diversification on the foundation of green start-ups by using a panel dataset of Chinese provinces during the period of 2014-2020 and negative binomial regression models. The results show that related and unrelated environmental technology diversification can significantly promote the foundation of green start-ups through knowledge spillovers.Due to the proximity of cognition, related environmental technology diversification has stronger knowledge spillovers, which makes it more effective in promoting the foundation of green start-ups. Additionally, related and unrelated environmental technology diversification can promote green patent applications through knowledge spillovers. Both green patent applications and green start-up creation need the support of green R&D resources, which makes green patent applications crowd out green start-ups. Finally, green patent applications have a negative indirect effect on the relationship between related (unrelated) environmental technology diversification and the foundation of green start-ups; besides due to the close connection between related environmental technology diversification and the original environmental technologies, the newly generated green knowledge is less expanded and the incumbents are very easy to set up knowledge spillover barriers by strategically applying for green patents to reduce the knowledge spillovers of related environmental technology diversification. Therefore, green patent applications negatively moderate the relationship between related environmental technology diversification and the foundation of green start-ups. Unrelated environmental technology diversification less depends on the original environmental technologies, which makes the newly generated green knowledge expand more, and the incumbents are not easy to set up knowledge spillover barriers. In this way green patent applications positively moderate the relationship between unrelated environmental technology diversification and the foundation of green start-ups. In order to promote the diversified serve of environmental technology to green entrepreneurship, the government needs to be aware of the importance of the environmental technology structure to green entrepreneurship, guide innovation subjects to conduct research on related environmental technology diversification around the innovation chain, value chain, industrial chain and other chains, and encourage universities, scientific research institutes and enterprises to carry out green R&D cooperation and，environmental technology research and green industry development. Moreover, the government should respect and grasp the market rules of green innovation and entrepreneurship, macro-control green R&D resources, reasonably allocate them to green innovation and green entrepreneurship, weaken the competition for green R&D resources between green innovation and green entrepreneurship, and promote the coordinated development of green innovation and green entrepreneurship. While the entrepreneurs can take advantage of the positive effects of environmental technology diversification on the foundation of green start-ups, actively seek and find entrepreneurial opportunities in the low-carbon field in regions with high degree of environmental technology diversification to promote the foundation of green start-ups.#br#
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Received: 19 May 2022
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