An empirical study on the impact of R&D investment and employee involvement on innovation commercialization — Evidence from IT firms in China

Using a sample of 126 firms in Chinese IT industry, we developed an empirical model which tests the impact of R&D investment and employee involvement on innovation commercialization. The results showed that the expenditure of R&D has a positive effect on performance of innovation commercialization, while the number of R&D staff has trivial impact on that. The results also revealed that employee involvement has no direct effect on commercialization performance, but plays a moderating role on the effect of R&D investment on commercialization of innovation. More specifically, the R&D expenditure of a firm with high involvement system has less positive impact on the number of new product, but more positive effect on the profit of new product.