Evaluation of Innovation Efficiency and Innovation Mode of Patent-Intensive Industries

Existing researches by Chinese researchers on the innovation performance of patent-intensive industries usually use the amount of patent grants, Innovation performance is not fully reflected in the relationship between innovation input and innovation output. This paper aims to open the “black box” of the innovation process and divides the innovation process into R&D process and the process of scientific output converted into economic output with the intention of providing a better understanding of the important role of patents in the development of industries and ideas for the formulation of industrial policies by focusing on the innovation performance and innovation mode of patent-intensive industries during 2004–2016 using DEA method. Results show that the innovation efficiency of Guangdong's patent-intensive industries is very low with an average level of 0.477 in the R&D stage and 0.361 in the stage of technological achievement transformation, which is highly related to the government-led mode of technological innovation, due to the non-optimal allocation and inefficient management of innovative resources, government-led technological innovation always leads to low quality of technological innovations. In addition, there are great differences in the innovation modes of patent-intensive industries. Therefore, it is necessary for the government to take the differences among different industrial innovation modes into account when formulating industrial and technological policies to improve innovation performance.