Abstract
To investigate Chinese enterprises’ innovation quality and examine how it is determined by the enterprise ownership, this paper uses about 73.8 thousand invention patents applied by Chinese enterprises during 1985–2011 in estimating patent return based on the renewal period. We take patent return to be the measurement of innovation quality, and make a comparison between public and private enterprises. We find that the innovation quality of public enterprises is improved after restructuring, but is still lower than that of private enterprises. We may find the causes of the innovation quality differences from the allocation efficiency of R&D resources. Monopolized enterprises own higher innovation quality by monopolizing industry resources, which leads to a low R&D resources allocation efficiency. In comparison, the R&D resources allocation efficiency of public enterprises in the competitive industry is higher than that in monopolized enterprises. R&D resources allocation efficiency is generally inversely proportional to the public owned level, and proportional to the market competition level. This study generates an important policy implication, that is, the social R&D resources allocation efficiency of China would be improved by disposing part of R&D resources monopolized by public research institutes and public enterprises to private enterprises.
Highlights
For a long period of time, China’s technological innovation activities have been dominated by public enterprises and research institutions
We employ all the invention patents applied by Chinese enterprises because we relate our study to the patent duration
Based on the data of invention patent filed during 1985 to 2011 in China, this paper compares the quality of technological innovation between public and private enterprises by calculating the difference of their patent value, and obtains the following important findings: First, in the competitive industry, the patent value of public enterprises is significantly lower than that of the pure private enterprises, which shows that the overall innovation quality level of public enterprises is lower than that of the pure private enterprises
Summary
For a long period of time, China’s technological innovation activities have been dominated by public enterprises and research institutions. As one of the most important forms of scientific research achievements in R&D activities, patent value to a large extent represents the quality level of innovation activities [12,13,14,15], which should be considered as one of the important indicators. Based on the above fact, this paper attempts to attach the following issues: what is the difference between the contribution of private enterprises and state-owned enterprises in patent application under the current policy preference for public enterprises? By estimating the patent value, this paper explores the quality differences of technological innovation between public and private enterprises. This study not Sustainability 2020, 12, 3107 only provides a dynamic and intuitive method for the relevant departments to monitor technological innovation of enterprises, and comprehensively investigates the innovation input and output of enterprises with different ownership in China under the current policy preferences. We have provided theoretical reference for the rational allocation of R&D resources in China at this stage
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