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Academy fellow independent directors and innovation

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Abstract

Drawing on human capital theory, this paper develops a contingency approach to explore how independent directors’ scarce human capital affects innovation investment intensity and innovation outputs in the Chinese context. Controlling for the presence of ordinary technical independent directors (TIDs) and a range of other factors, we find that academy fellow independent directors (AFIDs) have an incremental positive effect on innovation investment intensity and innovation outputs, and that this effect exists only for non–state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs), which are more constrained in their ability and resources to pursue value-enhancing innovation activities. Our channel analyses suggest that AFIDs play a strong resource provision role in enhancing innovation. However, their positive role in promoting impactful innovation activities diminishes when they face intensified government intervention and political risk. We clearly document that regulations that are designed to impose only intense external monitoring of independent directors may have unintended negative consequences on innovation, particularly when firms’ demands for resource provision are intense, as is the case with firm innovation.

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Notes

  1. For example, academics account for about one third of outside directors in the U.S. (Chen, Han, Wang, Ieromonachou, & Lu, 2019), and approximately 40% of Standard & Poor’s 1500 firms have at least one professor on their boards (Francis, Hasan, & Wu, 2015). In China over 40% of independent directors had academic backgrounds (Quan & Li, 2017).

  2. For instance, Fich (2005) show that stock markets do not necessarily react positively to the appointments of academic directors. Fedaseyeu, Linck, and Wagner (2018) find that there is no significant relation between directors’ academic experience and their compensation, suggesting that firms do not place a higher value on academic directors. However, Francis et al. (2015) document a positive relation between academic directors and investment performance, and Pang, Zhang, and Zhou (2020) find that the stock market reacts negatively to the resignations of academic independent directors, suggesting their value enhancing role.

  3. We use the terms “innovation” or “innovation activities” to refer to both innovation effort or input (R&D intensity) and innovation output. Otherwise, we refer to a particular aspect of innovation specifically (e.g., invention patents and utility model patents).

  4. An example of the contributions of AFIDs to corporate innovation is Professor Ouyang Zhong, who is an AFID for the BOE Technology Group Co. Ltd. (BOE) and a leading expert in the field of liquid crystal. Professor Ouyang was appointed an independent director by BOE in 2007. Under his leadership, BOE received more than 2500 patents in 2012, with the total number of patents owned by the company reached over 10,000 by that year. BOE is ranked in the top three firms for the number of patent applications and ranked number one for the number of patents per R&D personnel. Because of his outstanding contributions, Professor Ouyang won the prize for the “most influential independent director” at the 9th Golden Round Table Award for the Board of Directors of Chinese Listed Companies in 2013.

  5. For example, Quan and Li (2017) find that during the period from 2003 to 2013, while an average of 43.51% of Chinese independent directors had academic backgrounds (e.g., professors from universities or scholars from party schools, research institutions, and other public institutions), only 2.52% of these independent directors were academy fellows (i.e., AIFDs).

  6. Huang (2017) reports in detail on the high-profile Fu Lin incident, which is a typical incident occurring in China during technology transfer and commercialization. Fu was a professor and top scientist in the field of district heating. He was officially arrested in 2016 and sued by the Public Prosecution Service of the Haidian Procuratorate in 2017 for embezzling RMB2.2 million of scientific research funds and for misappropriation of RMB4.99 million of public funds. The focus of the case was on the participation in the research process of Professor Fu’s affiliated companies and the subsequent commercialization of scientific research achievements.

  7. During our sample period, some firms hired more than one AFID, accounting for 0.2% of the sample. As a robustness check, we examine whether firms hiring more than one AFID are more innovative than firms hiring only one AFID. Our untabulated univariate analysis shows that across all of the innovation measures, there is no significant difference between firms with one AFID and firms with two AFIDs, suggesting that the incremental effect of additional AFIDs on innovation is limited.

  8. Note that the statistics of patent-related variables tabulated in Table 2 and used in our regressions are based on log-transformed values to normalize the distribution of the variables.

  9. For firms that have more than one AFID serving on the board in the year, AFID_Local takes the value of 1 if there is at least one local AFID, and 0 otherwise.

  10. It is possible that geographic proximity and expertise overlap to allow AFIDs to be better monitors and better resource providers. If that is the case, we should observe a more positive effect on innovation for local AFIDs than for non-local AFIDs. However, we do not find this evidence, suggesting that our results are not explained by this alternative explanation.

  11. For firms that have more than one AFID serving on the board in the year, Match_expertise takes the value of 1 if there is at least one AFID whose research expertise areas match the firm’s main operating business, and 0 otherwise.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Professor Debmalya Mukherjee (Editor), two anonymous reviewers, and workshop participants at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law for their helpful comments. Sihai Li and Yi Quan acknowledge the funding from National Natural Science Foundation (71602191, 72072183, 71702193), MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (20YJC630063), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of Zhongnan University of Economics and Law. Kun Tracy Wang acknowledges the funding support from the Australian National University through a College of Business and Economics Research Committee Grant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Accounting, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Wuhan, China

    Sihai Li & Yi Quan

  2. School of Management, West Yunnan University of Applied Sciences, Dali, China

    Sihai Li

  3. School of Accounting, Hunan Universtiy of Technology and Business, Changsha, China

    Yi Quan

  4. Department of Applied Finance, Macquarie University, Macquarie Park, NSW, Australia

    Gary Gang Tian

  5. Research School of Accounting, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

    Kun Tracy Wang

  6. School of Business, Western Sydney University, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Stella Huiying Wu

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Appendix 1

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Table 14 Variables and definitions
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Li, S., Quan, Y., Tian, G.G. et al. Academy fellow independent directors and innovation. Asia Pac J Manag 39, 103–148 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10490-020-09749-3

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