As China's strategy for independent innovation continues to deepen and the trend of "de-globalization" in the restructuring of industrial chains intensifies, the issue of "bottlenecks" in key industries is becoming increasingly serious. In the new stage of high-quality economic development in China, it is imperative to accelerate the breakthrough innovation capabilities of "Specialized, Refined, Differential, and Innovative" (SRDI) enterprises, to promote new drivers of development through technological innovation, and to achieve innovation-driven and intrinsic growth. In recent years, SRDI enterprises have made significant progress in the field of standard setting. Technical standards are gradually becoming a key guarantee to lead SRDI enterprises in breakthrough innovation, and to achieve autonomous control, security and stability in industrial and supply chains.
At present, the formulation of technical standards as an important way to integrate into the innovation network has attracted the attention of scholars. Most existing studies focus on the role of technical standards in improving information asymmetry, reducing business operational risks, and constraining technological diversity. Few literatures examine the innovative effects of technical standard formulation from the perspective of the innovation network, especially the impact on breakthrough innovation. Moreover, relevant studies are mainly based on theoretical analysis; due to the difficulty of collecting information on the technical standardization of microenterprises, there is a lack of empirical studies that systematically examine the relationship between technical standardization and breakthrough innovation of SRDI enterprises. From the perspective of innovation network, the innovation network formed by the formulation of technical standards can help SRDI enterprises achieve subversive goals through knowledge sharing and resource complementarity among innovation subjects.
Hence, in order to explore the impact of technical standardization on the breakthrough innovation of SRDI enterprises and its functioning mechanism from the perspective of innovation network, this study takes breakthrough innovation as the dependent variable and the formulation of technical standards as the independent variable, and selects enterprise size, growth rate of business income, cash flow, property rights nature, enterprise age, asset-liability ratio, and enterprise performance as control variables to establish the model. It then takes the listed SRDI enterprises announced by the state since 2019 as a sample, and the final sample obtained includes 960 SRDI listed companies, of which 668 samples have participated in the formulation of technical standards, and 292 samples have never participated in the formulation of technical standards, with a total of 7 723 observations.
It is concluded that, firstly, the formulation of technical standards can significantly promote the breakthrough innovation of SRDI enterprises. Secondly, the impact of technical standard setting is more significant in non-state-owned enterprises, enterprises with stronger absorptive capacity and enterprises with higher proportion of female supervisors. Thirdly, the formulation of technical standards can promote the breakthrough innovation of SRDI enterprises by broadening the knowledge breadth and improving innovation efficiency. Fourth, the supplier’s technical standard setting has significantly improved the breakthrough innovation of SRDI enterprises. However, due to the substitutability and specificity of input, the innovation spillover effect of customer technology standard setting is not significant.
This study has made contributions in three aspects. Firstly, following the theory of innovation networks, the study explores the relationship between standard setting and breakthrough innovation in SRDI enterprises, and verify its mechanism from the perspectives of knowledge breadth and innovation efficiency, which enriches and supplements relevant research. Secondly, the study attempts to shift the present research focus from incremental innovation to breakthrough innovation, actively exploring new technological paradigms and unknown knowledge areas, and deepening existing research on SRDI enterprise innovation. Thirdly, utilizing the supplier and customer data of SRDI enterprises, the study characterizes the innovation interaction effects of upstream and downstream enterprises in the ecosystem, and by the end it proposes to pay full attention to the technological changes of suppliers and customers, actively carry out strategic learning, promote upstream and downstream integration and collaborative innovation.