技术标准国际对接与国际创新合作——兼论中国融入全球创新网络的路径选择

Abstract

The international alignment of technical standards is a high-level institutional opening-up measure for China to proactively integrate into global innovation networks and promote innovation through openness. This paper measures the textual similarity between patent texts and adopted technical standard texts using natural language processing methods, identifies the degree of firms' exposure to international alignment of technical standards, and empirically examines its impact on firms' international innovation cooperation using high-dimensional fixed effects models. The study finds that international alignment of technical standards significantly enhances firms' international innovation cooperation by reducing cross-border technical coordination costs, contractual risk costs, and uncertainty shocks induced by trade frictions. However, the alignment has not effectively nurtured domestic innovation, due to the mismatch in the current mode of technical standard alignment in China's integration into global innovation networks. Taking the author order of international collaborative patents as the starting point, the study finds that while the identical and equivalent adoption of international standards can more effectively enhance Chinese firms' international collaborative innovation, its improvement on their innovation leadership is limited. Conversely, adopting modified standards that better match China's technological development stage can effectively enhance domestic firms' leadership in international innovation collaboration, improve innovation quality, break through firms' innovation boundaries, and expand their international innovation influence. Further analysis based on differences in firms' relative innovation foundations reveals that the blind pursuit of standards consistency by firms with weaker innovation foundations is the key reason why international alignment of technical standards fails to nurture domestic innovation. From the perspective of institutional opening-up through standards, this study provides practical solutions and empirical evidence for China to fully utilize global innovation resources and achieve technological self-reliance.