Abstract
Earlier studies on the innovation process in the high-tech manufacturing industry failed to take environmental pollution into account, making it difficult to estimate green innovation efficiency in the industry. From a perspective of innovation value chain, this paper decomposes green innovation process in the high-tech manufacturing industry into two stages: R&D stage and achievement transformation stage; a network DEA approach considering undesirable outputs is utilized to estimate the green innovation efficiency in China’s high-tech manufacturing industry. Compared with the method of conventional innovation efficiency without considering environmental pollution, the estimation method for green innovation efficiency can not only avoid bias of estimation results of provinces producing low pollution emissions like Inner Mongolia and Hainan but also reflect the volatility in efficiency of the high-tech manufacturing industry before and after the implementation of the environmental law.
Highlights
With increasing attention to the global competitiveness of the high-tech manufacturing industry since the 1990s, China has been steadily increasing its inputs in this area
Drawing on studies on the two-stage innovation process of China’s high-tech manufacturing industry [29] and considering the factor of environmental pollution in the innovation process [30], this paper proposes the conceptual framework of green innovation in the high-tech manufacturing industry from the innovation value chain (IVC) perspective
Drawing references from existing studies on the input and output indicators pertaining to the two-stage green innovation efficiency in the high-tech manufacturing industry [28, 29] and considering the availability of data, this paper considers R&D capital and R&D personnel as inputs of the R&D stage [9], and the number of patent applications and the number of invention patents are owned as intermediate outputs [23]; capital and labor are selected as the supplementary inputs in the achievement transformation stage [29, 32]; and new product sales revenue, prime operating revenue, and pollutant emissions are used as the final outputs [30, 33, 34]
Summary
With increasing attention to the global competitiveness of the high-tech manufacturing industry since the 1990s, China has been steadily increasing its inputs in this area. China’s high-tech industries are still facing significant problems in terms of innovation capabilities and environmental pollution. A large number of high-tech manufacturing firms without adequate innovative capabilities have been locked in low-value-adding, marginally profitable manufacturing processes, which has inhibited structural upgrade of the manufacturing industry and the improvement in the value chain and caused a series of environmental pollution problems. With a severe scarcity of innovation resources and increasingly stringent environmental regulations, characterizing green innovation efficiency in the high-tech manufacturing industry is of a great significance for facilitating policy-making and sustainable development of industries in China
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
