Research On The Evolution And Its Driving Forces Of Innovation Network Of Photovoltaic Industry In China

In the knowledge economy era,innovation is becoming an important factor of regional economic development,and is getting a lot of attention in the field of economic geography.Since the "evolution turns",there has been many studies on network evolution and driving factors.Photovoltaic industry is one of China's strategic emerging industries.It plays an important role in the national strategies of energy structure optimization and industry transformation.The photovoltaic industry got rapid growth,and has a large space for development.However,with the expansion of scale,industry performs not well enough in terms of technology quality,and some key technology still has to import from some western countries,which restricted the industry in the international competitiveness.Therefore,it is of great significance to explore the evolution characteristics and trend of innovation network of the photovoltaic industry in China,and to clarify the motivation of network evolution.Photovoltaic industry is a technology-intensive industry,productions change rapidly,and technology innovation is indispensable.Given the high risk of innovation,actors tend to cooperate together.Many regional economists use methods like interviews,panel data analysis and logical deduction to explore the factors and mechanism of innovation network evolution.Based on previous researches,combining theories and current situation,this article uses social network indicators and mathematical models to quantify the innovation network evolution process and its driving forces of photovoltaic industry in China so that to enrich research contents of innovation network and to improve the development of photovoltaic industry.Based on the joint patent indicators from Shanghaiip,this article uses some software like R,UCINET and ArcGIS to displays the characteristics and the trend of innovation network evolution from different views like space distance,the industrial chain,the enterprise groups and the network topology.In addition,ERG model and SAO model were used to filter factors of innovation network evolution.What is more,based on different geographic distance threshold,this article investigates the influence mechanism of the proximity factors.The results show that:overall,innovation network of photovoltaic industry in China developed quite well,with more expansive scale.Innovation activities in the downstream of photovoltaic industry chain are becoming more often.There are more closely internal contact and increasingly willingness of actors.Enterprise group internal cooperation has been kept high proportion for many years,which is an indispensable part of the network.Ranking highly on the betweenness centrality,universities and research institutes play an important role of"middlemen" in the network.The space distance between actors increase and cross-regional cooperation rise;Cooperative innovations diffused from the eastern area to the western area,from the central cities to the peripheral cities.The actors' own innovative capacities and organization proximity show significant positive effect,while geographical proximity indirectly promotes the development of innovation network by enhancing other dimensions of proximity.