Sustainable potential of the strategic emerging industries: Insights from technological innovation, economy, and ecology

Abstract

To meet the rapidly growing demands of SDG-9 and high-quality development (promote sustainable industrialization and foster innovation), expediting the technological innovation-driven strategic emerging industries (SEIs) is a top priority in China's 14th Five-Year Plan. To investigate the sustainable potential of SEIs, an integrated evaluation and early-warning system is constructed. Specifically, for sustainability assessment, the entropy weight method is utilized to assign weights for multidimensional indicators concerning SEIs, economy, and ecology, and the coupling coordination degrees (CCDs) among the three dimensions are calculated. For trend predictions in the early-warning module, CCDs are utilized as the input into an optimized grey Bernoulli forecasting model with adaptive structure and modified initial values that can prioritize the new information. The experiments conducted on the 1498 observations of listed companies in SEIs in Zhejiang validated the efficacy and feasibility of the proposed framework with the ability to pinpoint the relatively behindhand subsystems and generate accurate predictions. The results indicate that there are no incompatibilities between ecological preservation and economic progress, and the promotion of SEIs is conducive to comprehensive harmonious, and sustainable development. Furthermore, several countermeasures are formulated based on the experiments.