Director’s Technical Expertise, Technological Innovation, and Corporate Resilience: Evidence from China

This paper aims to provide new evidence on the relationship between the technological expertise of directors and corporate resilience. Using detailed data from Chinese high-tech listed firms spanning years 2017 to 2021, this study develops an integrated model and applies ordinary least squares, fixed-effects panel regressions, and two-stage least-squares regressions to empirically assess the interplay among directors’ technological expertise, technological innovation, and corporate resilience. The findings reveal that directors’ technological expertise positively influences corporate resilience, with R&D investment and exploratory innovation serving as statistically significant mediators in this causal pathway. In contrast, exploitative innovation plays a masking rather than mediating role between directors’ technological expertise and corporate resilience. Heterogeneity analysis suggests that the positive effects of directors’ technological expertise are more salient in firms at the growth stage, in highly competitive industries, and in cities with a nascent digital economy. Further analysis indicates that executive technology directors have a more pronounced impact on corporate resilience than non-executive ones. The intermittent balance-innovation model, characterized by a conspicuous difference in investment between exploitative and exploratory innovation, partially mediates the relationship between directors’ technological expertise and resilience. Our findings provide a new perspective for understanding corporate resilience and offer significant policy implications for realizing the innovation-driven effect of technology directors.