Plenary Lecture

Measuring Innovation Efficiency of Chinese Low- and Medium-Technology Sectors

Professor Jiancheng Guan
School of Management, Fudan University
200433 Shanghai, China

Abstract: Low- and Medium-Technology (LMT) sectors play a key role in development and prosperity of developing countries. However, the problem of measuring innovation efficiency of LMT sectors has not yet been solved due to the many criteria required to characterize its complexity. The presentation develops tools for reconciling diverse measures characterizing the innovation efficiency of the LMT sectors. This approach inherently recognizes tradeoffs among various measures. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is used as a method for determining a multi-factor model for measuring the innovative efficiency of Chinese LMT sectors. A two-stage model of DEA to assess the efficiency of the innovative effort for Chinese industries is proposed. The first stage is to measure the technology efficiency and the second is to measure the economy efficiency. The integral stage is the combination of the two stages and to evaluate integral efficiency for the whole innovative process.
The findings indicate that there is V-shaped relationship of the average efficiencies across the Low-tech, Medium-tech and High-tech sectors at the stage-1. Most of Chinese industries have a relative high efficiency in the first stage, however, and a low efficiency in the second stage. Mediocre efficiency occurs for most of Chinese industries in the integral stage. Strikingly, the low- technology sectors achieve the highest innovation efficiency, even compared to the high-technology sectors. These reveal that there are some serious inconsistencies between technology capability and economic performance in most Chinese industries and their capability of transforming technology efficiency to economy is relatively poor. Research results further show that there is still much room for Chinese industries to improve their innovation efficiency. The findings also reveal that the heavy investment in R&D alone can neither bring high S&T output, nor competitive advantages.

Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Jiancheng Guan is a Professor at School of Management, Fudan University since September, 2007. He had been a Professor since 1994 at School of Management, Beijing University of Aeronautics & Astronautics. His teaching and research areas include Technological Innovation Management and Scientometrics. Jiancheng Guan was a visiting scientist for one year at the department of economy, University of Karlsruhe (TH) between 1988 and 1989 and Visiting Professor at Institute of Research in Innovation Management, University of Kiel, Germany during 1993-1994 for six months and 1997 for three months, financially supported by DFG and DAAD, respectively. He was also a Visiting Professor at German Aerospace Center for one month during 2000, financially supported by DLR. In 2002, 2004, 2005 and 2006, he did cooperation research as a research fellow at City University of Hong Kong for 10 months in total. He has been a guest research professor at Research Center for Technological Innovation, Tsinghua University.
As projects’ Principal Investigator, Guan has undertaken 9 research projects (Competitive Earmarked Research Grants) from National Natural Science Foundation of China, 3 research projects (Competitive Earmarked Research Grants) from Chinese Aeronautical Foundation and 3 research projects from Beijing S&T Committee in the areas of technology innovation management, R&D management and information management, respectively. He has published about 30 articles in Western journals and more than 100 refereed papers in Chinese academic journals, Proceedings of International Conferences He got three research prizes as Principal Investigator of research projects from the Ministry of Education of China, the Ministry of Aeronautical Industry of China and Beijing Municipality.