Technological Composition and Innovation Factors in Inventive Yangtze River Delta: Evidence from Patent Inventions

Abstract

Patents as proxy for technological trends is well noted. The rapid increase of patents in China, however, has aroused debates on its technological progress: ‘few original innovations’ are produced in advanced areas, and true ‘breakthroughs’ are disproportionate to the quantity of the applications. As different technological fields contributions vary to technological progress, a nuanced understanding towards technological composition is in need to help reveal China’s strength in technological innovation. This research takes the Yangtze River Delta (YRD), one of China’s most inventive city-regions, as an epitome to examine the issue via three steps: (1) valid patent inventions applied from 2010 to 2018 are sorted to capture the concentration and colocation features of 35 technological fields defined by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO); (2) four types (intensive, extensive, distinctive, and supportive) of technologies exemplifying technology intensity and interactivity are identified by the cross-classification method and further analyzed by spatial autocorrelation; (3) how urban factors relate to innovation of these four types of technologies are explored. This research unveils a mixed but polarized structure of technological composition in the YRD where the spatial concentration of technologies is as analogous to the nation’s but colocation is not; though quite a few technologies fall into the intensive (usually high-tech) category which assumes to be more likely to breed ‘breakthroughs’, their numbers are limited and far less than extensive (usually labor intensive) or supportive. Knowledge exchange is frequent in core inventive cities where economic performance measured by GDP is most eminently linked to patent inventions of categorized technologies, the exception is intensive technology for which the significance of university students overrides other factors.