**1. Introduction**

Innovation is not only the key factor for an enterprise to maintain its core competitiveness [1,2], but it is also the source of power for its economic development [3,4]. At present, the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic and the ebb of globalization lead to turbulence in the international market. Chinese enterprises are under increasing competitive pressure. To realize sustainable development, they need to rely on high-quality innovation to overcome the fundamental technological challenges and solve the "bottleneck" problem of key enterprise technologies. Meanwhile, the State Intellectual Property Office of China has repeatedly stressed that although the total number of patent applications of Chinese enterprises has been ranked first in the world, the quality of patents is generally low. China's economy has entered a high-quality development stage, which puts forward higher requirements for an innovation-driven strategy that enables quantity to match quality. This also requires enterprises to shift from the traditional pursuit of innovation ability and innovation quantity to the pursuit of innovation quality. Therefore, it is necessary to explore ways to improve innovation quality.

As the collective leader of the enterprise, the Top Management Team (TMT) has the highest strategic decision-making power, so the TMT has a great impact on enterprise innovation [5,6]. In recent years, due to the increasing difficulty of innovation decision making, TMT heterogeneity has attracted more and more attention [7,8]. TMT heterogeneity refers to the differences in demographic background characteristics and important cognitive concepts and values among senior management members. Based on the upper

**Citation:** Ma, R.; Lv, W.; Zhao, Y. The Impact of TMT Experience Heterogeneity on Enterprise Innovation Quality: Empirical Analysis on Chinese Listed Companies. *Sustainability* **2022**, *14*, 16571. https://doi.org/10.3390/ su142416571

Academic Editor: Akrum Helfaya

Received: 3 November 2022 Accepted: 6 December 2022 Published: 10 December 2022

**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

echelon theory, TMT heterogeneity affects the organization's performance and strategic choices [9,10]. In particular, more and more strategically minded researchers focus on how TMT heterogeneity affects innovation [11,12]. Among them, most scholars found that TMT heterogeneity can promote enterprise innovation. For example, Camelo-Ordaz (2005) [13] argued that TMT education heterogeneity is positively related to innovation performance. Taking the listed companies in the US healthcare industry as an example, Bass A E (2019) [14] found that TMT gender heterogeneity can promote enterprise innovation. On the contrary, some scholars have found that TMT heterogeneity inhibits innovation [15,16]. For example, Liu (2012) [17] believed that TMT age heterogeneity had a negative correlation with enterprise innovation performance.

In summary, two research gaps are shown in the existing literature on the influence of TMT heterogeneity on innovation. Firstly, prior studies have examined the effects of TMT heterogeneity on innovation outcomes [18] and innovation capability [7,19], but they have not yet deeply discussed its effect on innovation quality. The underlying mechanism between them has not been figured out. Secondly, there have been few studies on the effects of TMT experience heterogeneity on innovation quality compared to heterogeneity in terms of gender, age, education, and cognitive and functional background [18,19]. The influence of TMT experience heterogeneity on enterprise innovation quality has not attracted enough attention.

According to the knowledge classification method proposed by Michael Polanyi, experience is a rare tacit knowledge that is the essence of enterprise core competence. Experience, which is hard to learn, imitate, and transfer between enterprises, comes from the long-term work experience of TMT members and is a key source of enterprise core competitiveness. Yang et al. (2020) [7] argue that it is important to concentrate on TMT experience heterogeneity when investigating strategic issues, which is supported by Gu et al. (2020) [20]. Therefore, it is very important to explore the impact of TMT experience heterogeneity on enterprise innovation quality. In addition, TMT experience heterogeneity is an implicit feature, which needs the help of corporate behavior to manifest its role in innovation quality. At present, the speed of technological iteration is accelerating, and the difficulty of innovation is increasing. It is difficult for enterprises to achieve high-quality technological innovation by themselves. Therefore, looking for partners has become an important link in the process of enterprise innovation. Enterprises need to actively seek cooperation with the outside world and give full play to the resource advantages of each cooperative subject to achieve high-quality innovation. Meanwhile, in the process of seeking partners, TMTs have different familiarity with the market, partners, and customers due to their different technical participation, which will affect the direction of enterprise innovation, development, and partner selection. Therefore, to some extent, TMT technical participation will affect the relationship between TMT experience heterogeneity and enterprise partner diversity.

Therefore, the main questions to be solved in this study are listed as follows:


We contribute to TMT research in several ways. Firstly, we further enrich the research on TMT heterogeneity based on empirical analysis and provide a theoretical basis for enterprises to optimize the configuration of the TMT to improve innovation quality. Experience, as a kind of tacit knowledge, is an important source of competitive advantage for enterprises. This serves as our jumping-off point for a thorough analysis of the mechanisms behind the decision-making process and decision-making quality of various forms of TMT experience heterogeneity, and we expose their various contributions to the innovation quality. Secondly, we uncover the "black box" that TMT experience heterogeneity affects

innovation quality from an internal perspective. We discover the role of partner diversity as an intermediary, which offers theoretical support for enterprises to rationally optimize and organize TMT members, encourages the formation of diversified partnerships, and is of great practical significance because it helps enterprises to enhance innovation quality. Thirdly, we reveal the practical significance of TMT's participation in technology R&D in the context of different experience heterogeneities, which points out the practical path for enterprises to achieve high-quality innovation under the current complex economic environment. We also provide important guidance for TMTs with different experience heterogeneities to participate in innovation R&D, thus further helping enterprises avoid risks when making strategic decisions and ensuring the stable, sustainable, and high-quality development of enterprises.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 reviews the existing research. Section 3 introduces the theory and hypotheses about the effects of TMT experience heterogeneity on innovation quality. Section 4 clarifies the methodology and describes the data collection and processing. Section 5 presents our empirical results. Section 6 is heterogeneity analysis of talent, followed by Section 7 which highlights the discussion and conclusions.
