By Sun Zhiyan, Research Department of Development Strategy and Regional Economy, DRC

Research Report No.52, 2016 (Total 4935) 2016-4-27

Abstract: With the transformation of China‘s economic development entering the state of new normal, people in various regions have taken "innovation" as the top issue in their daily work. But their innovation policy lacks coordinated planning and their innovation development approach is not yet clear. This would easily lead to disordered competition and some obstacles restricting the trans-regional flow of innovation elements like knowledge, technology and talents and decrease the efficiency of "innovation". As a result, innovation input could not be effectively transformed into new power of regional economic growth, and the gap of innovation competence between different regions would also be further enlarged, resulting in severer regional differentiation. To solve these problems, it is suggested that we should form a two-type regional innovation policy system focusing respectively on "competence competition" and "regional advantage". We should enhance the cooperativity of various regions‘ innovation policies and decrease regional competition affecting innovation efficiency. Comprehensive evaluation of different regions‘ innovation foundation and innovation competence should be made in order to provide the basis for formulating targeted regional innovation policy. We should change the traditional distributed organization mode of regional innovation, encourage regions to form "innovation alliance" and reduce "zero-sum competition" and duplicated input between different regions. We should speed up relevant institutional reforms and push for more effective and further regional coordinated innovation.

Key words: regional innovation, coordinated innovation, work in close cooperation with an appropriate division of labour