Abstract
Accurate analysis of technological innovation mechanism in different regions is the key to promoting China’s technological innovation, economic transformation and upgrading. This paper collected statistical data of high-tech enterprises in 27 provinces in China from 2009 to 2016, established a novel PSO-GRNN model, and applied sensitivity analysis to explore the influencing factors and regional differences of enterprise technological innovation in Eastern, Central and Western China. The empirical results showed that the influencing factors were innovation investment, market environment, government support and foreign technology spillover sorting by impact size. Innovation investment was the decisive factor of technological innovation, but innovation resources mainly concentrated on Eastern China, severely insufficient in Central and Western China. Market environment was favorable to Eastern and Central China, but unfavorable to Western China, which restricted greatly the development of Western China. The principalagent problem of state-owned enterprise and the crowding out effect of government research and development funds jointly led to the negative influence of government support on technological innovation. Foreign technology spillover had significant positive effects on technological innovation in Western China. This paper clarifies some disputes about influencing factors of technological innovation and provides a new research perspective for related issues.
Highlights
At present, China’s economy enters the “new normal”, “innovation-driven growth” is the key to China’s future low carbon development, so stimulating the enterprise innovation consciousness to promote economic development through technological progress is the new driving force of China’s economy (Li et al, 2020; Xiao et al, 2018; Noesselt, 2017)
In view of the current arguments and even contradictory views on the influencing factors of technological innovation, this paper established a particle swarm optimization (PSO)-Generalized regression neural network (GRNN) model with better fitting of nonlinear relations, used sensitivity analysis to measure the effect size and regional variation of different factors on the technological innovation of China’s high-tech industries, drew different conclusions from previous studies, which were summarized as follows
In descending order according to the absolute value of impact size, the influencing factors of technological innovation are innovation investment, market environment, government support and foreign technology spillover, of which only government support has negative effects, the other three factors have positive effects
Summary
China’s economy enters the “new normal”, “innovation-driven growth” is the key to China’s future low carbon development, so stimulating the enterprise innovation consciousness to promote economic development through technological progress is the new driving force of China’s economy (Li et al, 2020; Xiao et al, 2018; Noesselt, 2017). Technological innovation ability of industrial enterprises is the guarantee for the sustainable development of a national or regional economy. Technology innovation ability is the source power China’s manufacturing development, and the core competitiveness of industrial enterprises (Wan et al, 2015; Zhu et al, 2019; Du et al, 2019). Some scholars believe that research and development (R&D) investment will stimulate technological innovation within enterprises (Zhong et al, 2011; Alarcón & Sánchez, 2013), while others found that R&D investment is affected by uncertainties such as income and reward period, business opportunities of new products/services, and imitation threat from competitors.
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