How Does Philanthropy Influence Innovation Management Systems? A Moderated Mediation Model with a Social Exchange Perspective

Social philanthropy and innovation systems both require significant resource investment—how can organizations achieve both? This paper combines social exchange theory, signaling theory and imprinting theory to analyze the intrinsic dynamics mechanism from the perspective of government technology resource acquisition and to explore the influential role of generalist CEOs. Based on the hand-collected multidimensional career experience dataset of CEOs and the quantitative analysis of 3651 enterprises in China’s A-share listed manufacturing industry from 2010–2019, the results show that: philanthropic donation has a systematic contribution to corporate innovation investment, in which government science and technology (S&T) resource acquisition plays a partially mediating role; generalist CEOs significantly enhance the effect of philanthropic donations and government S&T resource acquisition on innovation investment. Finally, the statistical results remain stable in the lagged effects experiment and the IV-2SLS model analysis using exogenous variables. The contribution of this study lies in expanding the research on maximizing the combined benefits of economic value creation and social performance from a social exchange perspective, and helping us understand why the share of generalists in the global managerial market big data has been steadily increasing.