Assistant Researcher Sun Rui’s Research on the Gradual Reform of China’s Intellectual Property System Published in Economic Research

Recently, the academic paper The Gradual Reform Path of the Intellectual Property System: The Collaborative Evolution of the "Promising Government" and the "Effective Market", completed by Assistant Researcher Sun Rui from the School of Economics, Shandong University as the corresponding author, was published in Issue 9, 2024 of Economic Research, a top journal in economics. The other three co-authors are Professor Sun Xiaohua, Associate Professor Ma Xuejiao and doctoral student Tang Zhuowei from Dalian University of Technology.

The intellectual property system is the basic guarantee for stimulating the vitality of innovation subjects and innovation-driven development. Based on the institutional logic of gradual reform, this paper divides the reform of China’s intellectual property system into the initial stage and the mature stage, constructs a dynamic game model of innovation of leading enterprises and imitation of following enterprises, theoretically explores the impact mechanism of reform measures at different stages on enterprise innovation decision-making, and explores the rationality of the gradual reform of intellectual property rights by comparing the innovation effects generated by the collaborative evolution of the promising government and the effective market. In terms of empirical evidence, taking the construction of national intellectual property pilot and demonstration cities as a quasi-natural experiment, the theoretical hypothesis is empirically tested using micro-level data. The results show that the construction of intellectual property pilot cities in the initial stage effectively promotes the growth of innovation quantity, while the construction of intellectual property demonstration cities in the mature stage significantly promotes the improvement of innovation quality. Mechanism testing shows that the growth of innovation quantity mainly comes from government-led quantity-oriented financial incentives, and the role of reducing institutional costs is relatively limited. The improvement of innovation quality relies on market-oriented financial incentives and strengthening intellectual property protection. Institutional environment analysis shows that the degree of marketization and opening to the outside world affects the reform effect. The research conclusions of this paper are not only of great value for understanding the "Chinese governance" of innovation system reform, but also broaden the policy ideas for optimizing the national innovation governance system in the new development stage.

Sun Rui is an Assistant Researcher at the School of Economics, Shandong University, and a Young Expert of the "Taishan Scholar" Program of Shandong Province. His research interests include industrial organization theory and innovation economics. His research findings have been published in domestic prestigious journals such as Economic Research (2 papers), Journal of Management Sciences in China, and China Soft Science. He won the Innovation Achievement Award of the China Information Economics Society in 2023.

Link to the original paper: http://www.cesgw.cn/cn/NewsInfo.aspx?m=20140724181610733356&n=20241031144919480866