Government sponsorship and innovation: the Gazelle Plan in China's Zhongguancun Science Park
研究了中国中关村科技园区的瞪羚计划，发现该政府资助项目通过影响外部融资来促进企业创新，但效果有限，尤其对风险资本的调节作用和新产品销售提升不明显。
Promoting high‐growth enterprises' innovation performance has become an explicit policy focus in recent years. This study extends the extant literature on the effects of public funding schemes by focusing on an under‐researched sponsorship scheme designed to develop the financial market and mobilize external finance for innovation. We posit that external finance has positive and moderating effects on innovation. The positive effect improves firms' innovation performance; the moderating effect diminishes when the amount of external finance received by firms exceeds a threshold level. We further hypothesize that sponsorship improves firms' innovation performance by enhancing the positive and diminishing moderating effects. To test our hypotheses, we selected Zhongguancun Science Park's Gazelle Plan as the study context. We constructed a balanced panel of 37,270 firm‐year observations and adopted difference‐in‐differences and panel threshold models to provide an evidenced‐based approach for refining public support policies for firm innovation. The results suggest that the Gazelle Plan has limited effects on enhancing the positive and moderating effects of venture capital and promoting new product sales. Implications and suggestions for academia and policymakers are provided.