Policies and exploitative and exploratory innovations of the wind power industry in China: The role of technological path dependence

Abstract

Exploitative innovation emphasizes the refinement of technologies. For example, the super long and super flexible blade is an improvement on the traditional blade. Exploratory innovation emphasizes the breakthrough of technological trajectories. The floating offshore wind turbine represents a revolutionary innovation. For survival and prosperity, wind power enterprises need to excel simultaneously at both exploitative and exploratory innovations. The Chinese government has issued a series of wind power innovation policies, but their impact on exploitative and exploratory innovations is not clear. Moreover, technological path dependence describes the connection between intertemporal innovations. The prevalence of QWERTY keyboard is the best case. While the effect of technological path dependence on the impact of innovation policies is also unknown. Using micro-data from listed Chinese wind power enterprises from 2006 to 2019, this study clarifies the effects of innovation policies on exploitative and exploratory innovations, and assesses the moderating effect of technological path dependence. Our results indicate that the effects of wind power innovation policies are significant, yet ambiguous. All categories of policies improve exploitative innovation, but negatively impact exploratory innovation. Besides, technological path dependence positively moderates the positive relationship between policy and exploitative innovation and the negative relationship between policy and exploratory innovation.