Research on the Mechanism of Entrepreneurs’ Age in Enterprises’ Innovation Ecosystem: A Grouping Regression Verification Based on Gender

Abstract

The construction of the innovation ecosystem plays an important role in the technology research and development activities of innovation-oriented enterprises. How to effectively promote the perfection of enterprise innovation ecology determines the quality of engineering technology activities of innovation-oriented enterprises. Entrepreneurs play a key role in enterprise innovation ecological construction, especially in resource allocation. Therefore, based on the Upper Echelon Theory, this paper investigates the "age" effect of enterprise innovation ecological construction under the influence of top managers and its economic consequences under the adjustment of various heterogeneous factors. Based on this, this paper selects the data of GEM listed companies from 2009 to 2017 as samples, uses STATA14.0 for an empirical test, constructs an OLS model with quadratic terms, and uses multiple grouping variables for a grouping regression test. The main results show that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between the entrepreneurs' age and R&D investment, that is, due to the influence of entrepreneurs, there is a midlife crisis in R&D investment behaviors of enterprises; the test of gender grouping shows that female entrepreneurs alleviate this crisis. The conclusion of this paper reveals the influence of entrepreneur's age on enterprise innovation activities, and puts forward the important role that female managers may play in R&D activities, which provides managers with references for improving the technical level and engineering quality of innovation-oriented enterprises.