Founder CEO, CEO Characteristics, and Firm Innovation Efficiency: An Empirical Study of China’s GEM-Listed Companies

Abstract

While it is widely known that founder Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) can influence firm innovation, few studies have comprehensively examined how the founder CEO affects the firm’s innovation input, innovation output, and input-to-output conversion rate, and how these effects depend on the founder CEO’s demographic, cognitive, and corporate positional characteristics. We analyze the nine-year panel data of China’s Growth Enterprise Market (GEM)-listed companies to empirically study the relationship between founder CEO (vs. non-founder CEO), CEO characteristics, and firm innovation efficiency. Our analysis produces four major findings. First, founder CEO firms have a lower innovation input and higher innovation output than non-founder CEO firms. Second, compared with male founder CEOs, female founder CEOs can further reduce innovation input without sacrificing innovation output. Third, founder CEOs with a higher education level can also further reduce innovation input without sacrificing innovation output. Finally, compared with founder CEOs that are not the chairman of the board, the founder CEOs that take dual positions (CEO and chairman) allocate higher innovation input, but the innovation output does not increase. These findings have implications for both research and practice in helping firms achieve sustainable development.

Eficiência Em Inovação, Experiência Internacional Do Diretor Executivo E Valor Da Empresa Em Companhias De Chips Chinesas

“…As preferências do CEO podem influenciar grandemente a contribuição na inovação das empresas, e os mais arrojados tendem a investir mais em inovação (Wang et al, 2022;Zhang et al, 2021). Por um lado, um CEO mais inovador pode influenciar indiretamente a capacidade e a disposição de inovação de toda a organização ao influenciar a cultura organizacional, promovendo assim um maior número de projetos de inovação da empresa.…”

Trending topics and themes in environmental innovation research based on topic modeling

“…Highly educated CEOs have a strong green consciousness and tend to develop ideas that benefit the environment and implement eco-innovative behaviors to achieve sustainable corporate development (King et al, 2016). The duality of a CEO can increase his or her autonomy in decision-making and reduce resistance from the board of directors when companies explore emerging technologies; therefore, firms are more likely to convert innovation investments into more specific innovation outputs (Wang, Pei, & Liang, 2022), thereby increasing the generation of environmental innovation behavior.…”

Industry Life Cycle, CEO Functional Background and Corporate Sustainable Development: Evidence from Listed Companies in China

“…(2) Functional Background of the CEO (FB). Referring to the prior practice [42][43][44], this paper selects the general manager, President or CEO as the CEO of a listed company for research. As for the determination of functional background, this paper draws lessons from the ideas of Li and Zhang [4] and determines the background types of peripheral function (PF), throughput function (TF) and output function (OF) according to the department in which the CEO used to be in charge and the name of the main position.…”