Innovation and Internationalization: Evidence from Chinese Manufacturing Enterprises

Innovation plays a key competitive role in globalization. Despite China’s rapid technological advances and the prominence of its internationalization strategy in the country’s economic development, few studies have investigated the relationship between innovation and internationalization. Through three standalone studies investigating the impact of international technology learning channels on innovation performance, the impact of innovative capability on export performance, and the effect of innovative capability on outward FDI (OFDI) using data of China’s manufacturing firms, this article-based dissertation contributes to a more granular and multifaceted understanding of innovation and internationalization in emerging market enterprises (EMEs). This dissertation is positioned at the intersection of international business and innovation research and is rooted in international economics. Drawing on the empirical cases of EMEs in China’s manufacturing industries, the overarching research question guiding this thesis is: how do international technology learning channels affect the innovation performance in EMEs and in turn how does innovation capability impact EMEs' internationalization? To answer this research question, this dissertation uses several large datasets and various econometric methods to study the relationship between innovation and internationalization in emerging economies from three perspectives, resulting in three articles.