The Impact of Patent Insurance on Firms' Ambidextrous Innovation: A Quasi-natural Experiment Based on the Patent Insurance Pilot in China

: The uncertainty of patent infringement risks and the costs of enforcing patent rights trigger a chilling effect, weakening firms’ expectations of innovation returns. As an institutionalized risk-compensation tool, patent insurance offers a potential means to alleviate this chilling effect. This study uses data on A-share listed firms on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges from 2007 to 2023 and treats the rollout of patent insurance pilot programs as a policy shock. A multi-period DID model is then employed to identify its influence on firms’ ambidextrous innovation. The results suggest that patent insurance enhances both breakthrough innovation and incremental innovation. This effect remains robust across different robustness tests. Mechanism tests show that patent insurance promotes firms’ ambidextrous innovation by relaxing financing constraints, increasing R&D investment intensity, and strengthening patent enforcement incentives. The effects are heterogeneous across ownership types, firm characteristics, and regional contexts. This study provides new micro-level evidence on ambidextrous innovation and offers guidance for emerging economies to mitigate the chilling effect on innovation and design incentive systems for ambidextrous innovation.