To date, the effect of the specific type of prior work experience of chief executive officers (CEOs) on innovation and firm performance remains poorly understood. Using upper perspective theory, this study argues that CEOs’ academic work experience affects firms’ innovation output, which in turn determines how research and development (R&D) activities affect firm performance. Analyzing a sample of 1210 Chinese publicly traded firms from 2013–2017, we found that firms with CEOs who were previously associated with universities or research institutions had better innovation output and performance than firms led by CEOs without such background. In addition, we found that former academics spent more on R&D investment, resulting in lower firm performance compared to firms that were not led by CEOs with an academic background. Furthermore, the innovation output was even higher, and performance was inversely reduced for ventures where state ownership is significant.

Under the background of increasingly severe environmental problems, green innovation has become a key way to realize coordinated development of economy and environment. Therefore, it is of great significance to explore the antecedent factors of green innovation. Based on the upper-echelon theory, this study explores the influence of the academic background of top management teams (TMT) on firm's green innovation outcomes and firm performance in Chinese listed companies. This study also discusses three boundary conditions for TMT's academic experience to promote firm's green innovation. The results show that TMT's academic experience promotes green innovation output. Moreover, TMT's academic experience do not have a uniform effect: strict environmental regulation strengthens the relationship between TMT's academic experience and green innovation output, while political connection and innovation input negatively moderate this relationship. Furthermore, green innovation output does not result in better economic benefits for enterprises with top executives who have academic experience, and this condition is observed more in state-owned enterprises. This study reveals the motivation of green innovation and provides a useful reference for enterprises to implement green innovation strategy more effectively.

Although government subsidies have gradually become a crucial means of endorsing public innovation policies, there remains no unified conclusion on the mechanism of their role in enterprise sustainable innovation investment. Employing sample data of listed Chinese manufacturing companies between 2011 and 2019, this study aims to discuss the incentive effect of government subsidies on enterprise innovation investment based on different enterprise ownership. With the combination of resource dependency theory and stakeholder theory, the findings suggest that the intensity of government subsidies exerts an incentive effect on corporate innovation investment; however, the incentive effect is different under the influence of political connections and investor attention. In particular, political connections inhibit the incentive effect and investor attention promotes the incentive effect. Overall, this study provides empirical evidence for the rational allocation of resources by the Chinese government and the acquisition of innovation investment by enterprises of different ownerships and the development of innovation capabilities.