“…We see political connections potentially having both positive and negative effects on radical (i.e., cutting-edge) innovations. On one hand, political connections may provide a more favorable operational environment (Peng and Luo, 2000), access to additional resources, financing, and information (Ridge et al 2017;Li et al 2018), as well as a confidence boost (Li et al 2008) to pursue risky innovative endeavors (Wang et al 2018). In contrast, political connections can backfire on firm innovation by triggering organizational inertia and a "resource curse" (You and Du, 2012;Shi and Zhu, 2014;Hou et al 2018), greater dependency on governmental interventions (Boubakri et al 2008;Marquis and Qian, 2013;Darendeli and Hill, 2016), and agency problems (Sun et al 2016;Bertrand et al 2018).…”