By Xiong Hongru, Research Department of Innovation Development, DRC 2020-9-11

Research Report, No.221, 2020 (Total 5965) 2020-9-11

Abstract: The construction of a market-based technological innovation system with enterprises as the mainstay and focusing on the in-depth integration of industry, academia and research is one of the major tasks for China to deepen its scientific and technological system in the new era. In light of international comparison, the overall development of China’s industry-academia-research cooperation (hereinafter referred to as IAR cooperation) remains to be enhanced, and it is, to various degrees, still lagging behind some major developed countries, especially in the performance of typical indicators relating to the share of university and college R&D input, the proportion of cooperative patents and academic entrepreneurship and the intensity of IAR cooperation. The problems mainly include the function separation of industry, academia and research, the insufficient attention to industrial demand and the incompatibility of incentives which have led to dislocations, single cooperation model, low enthusiasm of enterprises, sluggish development of intermediary system, inadequate preferential policies and high threshold for entry. Based on the problems mentioned above, this paper has proposed the following policy options: 1. Work needs to be done to further sort out the functional positioning between industry, academia and research. 2. The reform on scientific and technological management system needs to be accelerated so as to eliminate the barriers that hinder the transformation of scientific and technological achievements. 3. More small- and medium-sized enterprises need to be involved. 4. Specialized intermediary service network needs to be cultivated and developed. 5. More preferential policies need to be implemented towards scientific research funds management, the identification of technological achievements transfer and tax reduction and exemption.

Keywords: industry-academia-research (IAR) cooperation, in-depth IAR integration, scientific and technological system reform, international comparison, problems and countermeasures