Media Attention of Charitable Donations and Enterprise Innovation

Ou Jinwen; Chen Yisong; Lin Zhouyu

doi:doi:10.16538/j.cnki.fem.20200821.403

Summary

Enterprises have a strong incentive to seek and obtain the attention and support from many stakeholders including the market and the government. Specifically, by actively publicizing their social responsibility behaviors, enterprises can improve the confidence of their investors, maintain corporate reputation and acquire key resources including brand, talent introduction and social trust. First of all, the media attention and focus on charitable donations will form a “brand effect” on private entrepreneurs, which can strengthen the long-term orientation of enterprise development, promote enterprises to pay more attention to projects that will affect their future development, and invest more resources in economic activities such as technological innovation and environmental protection. Secondly, more media attention of charitable donations can help enterprises to enhance organizational legitimacy, thus attracting and acquiring key resources from stakeholders to promote enterprise innovation. Therefore, the media attention of charitable donation drives enterprise innovation. From the perspective of situational factors, through the publicity of charitable donations, enterprises acquire more important opportunities for the establishment of technical cooperation network, improvement of technical cooperation quality and acquisition of external knowledge. Moreover, political reputation can convey to the outside world the information that the enterprise has been recognized by the government, so the public signal of the enterprise’s charitable donations strengthens the government-enterprise bond established by the political reputation, helps the enterprise to obtain the necessary production and innovation resources, and thus promotes the innovation activities of the enterprise. Based on the above analysis, this paper focuses on the private listed enterprises from 2008 to 2016, analyzes how the media attention of charitable donations influences enterprise innovation, and studies the situational factors of the impact of media attention of charitable donations on enterprise innovation from the perspective of technology networks and political reputations. This paper concludes that the media attention of charitable donations can promote enterprise innovation, and the investigation on the background different from news media shows that the attention from the government media plays a greater role in promoting enterprise innovation. Further research shows that in respect to enterprises that need to establish technical cooperation networks and political reputations, the media attention of charitable donations plays a greater role in promoting enterprise innovation. The contribution of this paper to the research is embodied in the following aspects: Firstly, focusing on the new perspective of “media attention of charitable donations”, this paper studies the role of media, an important information medium, in promoting enterprise innovation. On this basis, this paper further reveals the economic effects and mechanism of action of the media attention of philanthropy, expands the research framework of related theory of the innovation and development, and enriches the research in the field of corporate social responsibility. Secondly, modern philanthropy cannot be separated from the involvement of media, because the publicity and supervision of the news media have become an important part of the modern philanthropic system. The conclusion of this paper provides scientific reference from the micro enterprise level for the government to formulate charity management policies and realize the win-win pattern between enterprise charity and innovative development, and provides important enlightenment for policy-makers.