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Promoting growth in patent activity was an important stated goal of China's Medium- and Long-Term Plan for Science and Technology Development (2006–20) , and it was a successful one. By the end of this ambitious blueprint, China had witnessed enormous growth in the number of granted patents, especially those granted to public universities. This vital role played by universities in technology innovation justifies further research on the role of academia with respect to the development of technology. However, most studies on patenting by Chinese universities are limited in terms of research scale and context, and patent performance is seldom investigated in great detail. This study first presents an overall analysis of the utility patents granted to Chinese public universities (not utility model patents). Then, we compare the patent performance of two elite university groups: Project 985 universities in China and member institutions of the Association of American Universities (AAU) in the USA. Our results show that Chinese universities account for a high proportion of the total patents granted in China, and the number of patents granted to universities has grown rapidly in recent decades, making them a very substantial contributor to China's innovation system. However, the value of patents did not improve as their counts surged. Compared to AAU universities, the technological and economic value of patents held by Project 985 universities is considerably lower, even for the top-patenting universities in China. These findings extend our understanding of technological innovation activity in China's academic landscape and might inspire future policies toward patent quality and impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

University–industry R&D collaboration is an important means to improve innovation efficiency; many governments have issued policies to promote it. The most frequent policy instruments implemented by policy-makers to foster firms' innovation are subsidies and tax incentives. The article elaborated on how subsidies and tax incentives influence the R&D collaboration efficiency through a panel dataset from 2009 to 2015 in China. The result showed that subsidies and tax incentives have a positive effect on collaboration efficiency, and the effect of subsidies on output is bigger than that of tax incentives. Taking the intensity of subsidy as a threshold variable, there is a significant single threshold effect on collaboration efficiency. However, there is no threshold effect when the intensity of the tax incentive used as the threshold variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is the entrepreneurial university mode that originally appeared in the US possible in China? Thirty-four universities in the '985 Project' were studied in order to address this question. It is hypothesized that the necessary internal factors for a university to be entrepreneurial are: its research, technology transfer and entrepreneurship capabilities. External factors include: government support through policies and funding, venture capital and collaborations with firms. We concluded that it is possible to achieve an entrepreneurial mode in China, though different from that in the US. As a developing country, China starts from a university-run enterprise model, forming firms within the university. These generally operate in nonhigh-tech mode to gain experience and raise capital, as well as develop research capacity, and then upgrade to a high-tech entrepreneurship mode. A few elite universities will become entrepreneurial universities within 10-20 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]