As the knowledge economy develops, technological innovation has been an important driving force to promote economic growth of one country. Among the factors which influence the development of technological innovation, intellectual property rights protection has played a key role. The theoretical indicates an inversed U-shaped relationship between intellectual property and technology innovation, which means there exists a critical value of intellectual property protection, so that improving intellectual property protection raises technological innovation level when the level of intellectual property protection is less than the critical value, however, increasing the level of intellectual property protection may reduce technological innovation level when intellectual property protection exceeds the critical value. The main purpose of intellectual property protection system is to encourage technological innovation, to increase the stock of knowledge, and to promote all kinds of technical cooperation and exchanges, but excessive intellectual property protection may bring negative impact of technological innovation and impede technological innovation process with technical market monopoly a certain degree. At present few literatures analyze the complex relationship between intellectual property protection and technological innovation empirically. Therefore, combining with the actual situation of China’s regional differences, making a research on intellectual property protection and technical innovation is of great theoretical and practical significance.Based on the industry perspective, this paper selects pharmaceutical manufacturing as research object and makes theoretical analysis, practical description and empirical study of the influence of intellectual property rights protection on technological innovation.In theoretical analysis, this paper firstly discusses the necessity of intellectual property from a microcosmic perspective of technology innovation, then describes the fundamental role of technology innovation in the process of intellectual property rights, finally summarizes the interaction between intellectual property protection and technological innovation activities.In empirical research, this paper takes property protection index, technology innovation level as core variable and the dependent variable, introduces the squared terms of intellectual property protection level and takes the regional economic development level, openness, industry position and so on into consideration, controls the endogenous problem between variables, using cross-sectional weighted least squares estimation to make an analysis of the influence of intellectual property protection on technological innovation in the eastern, central and western China. The empirical results show that:(1) there is a simulative effect of intellectual property protection on the technological innovation across different areas of China;(2) there is an inverse U-shaped relationship between intellectual property and technology innovation and it shows that stronger intellectual property protection can be harmful for technological innovation in the economically developed areas, and that this kind of non-linear relationship between intellectual property protection and technological innovation is not obvious in economically backward areas;(3) the increasing market position and profitability of pharmaceutical manufacturing have a significant positive effect on technological innovation in the central and eastern area, but it is of little importance in pharmaceutical manufacturing in the western;(4) regional openness doesn’t promote technological innovation level significantly and it indicates that foreign direct investment have a negative effect on technological innovation activities of domestic enterprises;(5) funding from the government in the pharmaceutical manufacturing R&D activities have little influence on innovation performance. |