Research On The Spillover Effect Of Technology Innovation In China's High-tech Industry

As the pillar industry of knowledge economy age, as well as the most intensive industrial innovation sector, high-tech industry occupies the "technology highland" in China's industry system. The purpose of high-tech industry development is to propel the sustained high growth of national economy. More importantly, it aims to enhance our country's capacity of independent innovation, to improve the national technology research and development level, and to promote the transformation and upgrade of traditional industries. As Endogenous Growth Theory points out, the contribution of technology innovation to economic growth not lies in the very innovation activity, but in the spillover effect of technology innovation achievements. Over the last three decades, China's high-tech industry is the most intensive industry that attracts foreign direct investments and introduces foreign technologies, and it is also an important beneficiary of international technology spillover. In that way, with the significantly improved industry scale and the technology innovation ability in current China, whether there exists spillover effect in China's high-tech industry technology innovation, whether it could take a leading role for other industries, and whether high-tech industry can take the historic responsibility of promoting strategic adjustment of economic structure and the economic development mode shift to the innovation-driven type, these three questions become the original intention and the main research objective of this paper. Therefore, based on previous studies, particularly inspired by domestic and overseas scholars' correlational research on knowledge spillovers and international industry technology spillovers, this thesis conducts an in-depth study on the basic theories of the high-tech industry technology spillover, and current situation of the intra-industry and inter-industry technology spillovers in China's high-tech industry.At the theoretical level, this dissertation attempts to summarize and develop the theories studies of the concept intent, basic features, cause of formation, influence effect, effect pathway, realization mechanism, and both internal and external relevant influence factors of high-tech industrial technology innovation spillover effect. The spillover of technology innovation in high-tech industry is an external economic phenomenon that creates welfare for other industry sectors, while the technological innovation industry itself does not get the corresponding return. Seeing from the causing mechanism, this dissertation argues that there are three aspects:the root cause is that high-tech industrial technology innovation inputs and outputs are of knowledge-intensive characteristics; endogenous power derives from the scarcity of knowledge innovation; extrinsic motivation lies in the strong agglomeration development characteristics of high technology industry. From the manifestations, the high-tech industry technology spillover is actually a kind of inter-industry spillover. Since there exists extensive economic and technological links between various industries, an industry's technology innovation not merely causes "pure" knowledge spillover which affects the output capacity of non-technological innovation industry, but changes of input and output price and market demands through market mechanism, bringing in extra market performance. Therefore, this dissertation extends the influence scope of high-tech industry's spillover from simple productivity to both productivity and market performance, which can be summarize as market rental effect and productivity effect. Thus, how does the spillover effect exert its influence? This dissertation suggests that the spillover of technology innovation in high-tech industry mainly relies on the economic technological relations between the products, labor, production technology, prices and investment of each industry, working through the correlation effects among industries. The effects mainly manifest as forward linkage effect and backward linkage effect. From microcosmic aspect, there are three channels to see this influence, namely, R&D activities, product flow, and human capital flow. With the different characteristics of each industry in nation economy, the influence of technology innovation spillover in high-tech industry is also exhibited differently in various industries. The main factors of technology innovation spillover in high-tech industry can be summarized as the following three aspects:the conditioned factors, such as inter-industry technological innovation gap and absorptive capacity of spillover beneficiary; the mechanical influence of the correlation patterns and degrees among different industries; and the outside environmental aspects, mainly reflected on industrial competition and institutional influence.At the empirical level, this dissertation conducts investigation and empirical test on the realistic foundation, intra-industry and inter-industry spillover of technology innovation in China's high-tech industry. Through analysis of the macro environment, evaluation of ability for technology innovation, industry relevance and case studies in particular industries, this dissertation concludes that China's high-tech industry has already been equipped with the basic conditions and practical basis for technology innovation spillover. Meanwhile, the result of empirical data quantitative analysis confirms that there are significant spillover effects of China's high-tech industry technology innovations in both intra-and inter-industry areas. In intra-industry aspect, the R&D activities in technology innovation sector, the flow of new product and market rental effect of human capital overflow have stronger effect compared with productivity, whereas, diverse modes of spillover among traditional industries exert significantly different influence. The market rental effect of high-tech industry's R&D activity is significantly weaker than its productivity effect, while its market rental effect of the new product flow is much stronger than its productivity effect. The investment of high-tech industry for human capital has a negative effect on market achievements and production capacity improvement of traditional industry. Further analysis of influence factors shows that both internal and external factors, such as technology innovation ability, human capital stock, industry correlation and the competitive environment of the industry, etc, have appreciable impact on the mode and level of high-tech industry technology spillover.