How to become the chosen one in the artificial intelligence market: the evidence from China

This study aims to explore how firms' innovation performance is related to their possibility of receiving public support, and the boundary conditions of this relationship. Specifically, we focus on the firms in the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) market, and study a specific public support, namely, Innofund. The results suggest that a firm's innovation performance has an inverted U-shaped effect on its probability of receiving Innofund. The effect, moreover, is moderated by whether a firm has received social investment, that is, the relationship between innovation performance and the probability of receiving funding is flattened by the receipt of social investment. Besides, a firm's ties to institutional intermediaries further strengthen the moderating effect of social investment. The findings carry implications for future research and technology policy.