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Bright minds or green Façades? Superstar inventors and substantive vs. strategic green innovation
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DOI：10.1080/14783363.2025.2608244.png)
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Abstract
En 中文
Against the backdrop of China's 'dual-carbon' transition, upgrading the quality of corporate green innovation has become a priority. Yet the pivotal role of scarce 'superstar inventors' - knowledge elites endowed with exceptional creativity and high societal recognition - remains insufficiently understood. Drawing on panel data for China's A-share listed firms from 2007 to 2023, this study distinguishes between substantive and strategic green innovation and empirically examines the heterogeneous effects of superstar inventors on both. The results show that superstar inventors increase firms' green patenting, with a stronger impact on strategic than on substantive green innovation. Mediation analyses indicate two main channels: external knowledge recognition and preferential allocation of government subsidies. The findings withstand a battery of rigorous robustness checks, including alternative operationalizations of the core constructs, exclusion of highly cited utility model patents, removal of high-tech industries, the inclusion of industry-year fixed effects, and multiple complementary estimators - such as an instrumental-variables strategy based on historical post-office density, propensity score matching, double machine learning, and bootstrap inference. Heterogeneity tests further reveal that these effects are more pronounced among firms with higher AI engagement and under stricter environmental regulation. Overall, the study deepens the talent-based view of innovation and offers concrete implications for differentiated talent governance and precision-oriented green policy design.
Keywords:
Substantive green innovation
strategic green innovation
superstar inventors
government subsidies
external knowledge recognition
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