Currently, to cultivate new drivers for developing new quality productive forces and comprehensively enhance enterprise independent innovation capabilities, it is essential to continuously promote deep integration of industry-academia-research and accelerate the commercialization of scientific and technological achievements from universities and research institutions to enterprises. To achieve this, patient capital—characterized by its long-term orientation, long-cycle assessment, and strong risk tolerance—must provide sustained and stable financial support for industry-academia-research integration projects, allowing sufficient time and resources for trial and optimization. This requires the government's guiding role. The Third Plenary Session of the 20th CPC Central Committee emphasized the need to better leverage the role of government investment funds to attract angel investment, venture capital, and private equity investment, guiding various types of capital to abandon the impetuous mentality of “quick success, quick entry and exit, and making fast money,” and instead persist in making long-term investments, strategic investments, value investments, and responsible investments. In recent years, governments at all levels have actively established guidance funds at the achievement commercialization stage of universities and research institutions, attracting widespread participation of funds from all sectors of society and encouraging the formation of patient capital adapted to deep integration of industry-academia-research. After years of development, the local government-guided technology commercialization investment and financing system has taken shape and has become an important pillar of patient capital needed to promote deep integration of industry-academia-research.
Taking the technology commercialization guidance funds established in various localities starting from 2013 as a quasi-natural experiment, this paper aims to explore whether guidance funds can assist enterprises in independent innovation. The research results show that: on one hand, technology commercialization guidance funds can effectively encourage and attract social capital to provide sustained and stable patient capital for technology commercialization; on the other hand, the technology commercialization project libraries established for investors reduce matching costs among industry-academia-research parties, promote continuous deepening of industry-academia-research integration, accelerate the speed at which enterprises within the jurisdiction obtain external knowledge resources from universities and research institutions, thereby significantly enhancing enterprise independent innovation levels. Heterogeneity analysis shows that: If the enterprise is located in a city with a high-tech industrial development zone or the enterprise has “specialized, refined, peculiar, and innovative” qualification, the promoting effect of technology commercialization guidance funds on enterprise independent innovation is more prominent, while in regions with higher financialization levels, the role of guidance funds is less prominent. By summarizing the above conclusions, we can draw the following insights on the development of technology commercialization mechanism reforms: first, enhance the economic attributes of technology commercialization project libraries to match the needs of different types of investors; second, assist enterprises lacking qualification certification in commercializing scientific and technological achievements through government procurement; third, promote the “open competition” system to create synergy among various industry-academia-research integration strategies.
Compared with previous literature, this paper makes contributions in three aspects: First, unlike scholars’ research on the impact of patient capital on financing support, industrial upgrading, and economic growth, this paper focuses on the promoting effect of patient capital at the enterprise independent innovation level. Through this unique research perspective, it reveals the key role of patient capital in stimulating enterprise technological innovation vitality. Second, based on the two core logics of capital agglomeration and knowledge matching, it rigorously demonstrates the mechanism through which technology commercialization guidance funds promote deep integration of industry-academia-research and enhance enterprise independent innovation levels. Third, from three dimensions—regional financialization level, enterprise innovation qualifications, and whether high-tech industrial development zones are established—it comprehensively analyzes the specific conditions under which technology commercialization guidance funds play their role, providing rich scenarios and evidence for empirical analysis.
This paper supplements empirical evidence of government funds cultivating patient capital and provides a feasible path for resolving the problems of short-term capital and difficult knowledge transformation in industry-academia-research integration.
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