Measuring the innovation production process: A cross-region empirical study of China’s high-tech innovations

Analyzing and measuring the innovation process from a quantitative perspective is needed for policy making, which can help in grasping and controlling the performance of innovations. There has been little literature to deal with it from a systemic perspective. In this study, a novel measurement framework for the typical innovation production process (IPP) is constructed from the system perspective associated with a relational network data envelopment analysis. It provides systematic and simultaneous efficiency measures for the overall process and internal sub-processes, i.e., upstream R&D process and downstream commercialization process. For confirming our measurement framework, we apply it to a cross-region empirical study of China’s high-tech innovations. The empirical innovation measurement provides in-depth evidences of China’s high-tech innovations inefficiency, and some policy recommendations are developed.