The National Innovation System (NIS) is a network composed of government, enterprises, universities, research institutions, financial institutions, and other organizations, as well as embedded elements like institutions, culture, and policies. Various entities within this system interact and collaborate through various forms to promote the generation, diffusion, and application of new knowledge and technologies. Enhancing the overall performance of the national innovation system (NIS) is crucial for building a strong scientific and technological foundation and a modernized socialist country. There are still issues with the overall effectiveness of the NIS. For instance, the collaboration and integration between technological innovation and economic development are not sufficient, and the cooperation between industry, academia, and research is not close enough, which hinders the efficient operation of the NIS, thereby affecting innovation efficiency and innovation capability, and making it difficult to provide strong support for high-quality development. However, current research on the overall performance of NIS is limited, with its connotation remaining poorly defined and evaluation research largely unexplored.
This paper extends the connotation of the overall performance of NIS from both domestic development and international contribution perspectives by synthesizing well-known domestic and international reports and existing literature on national innovation systems. It proposes that the overall performance of NIS encompasses the functional realization of a country's innovation system and its role in achieving national strategic goals, which are manifested through two key aspects: "efficiency" and "enablement". "Efficiency" refers to the relationship between inputs and outputs in the NIS, reflecting operational efficiency and resource allocation optimization. "Enablement" pertains to the NIS's role in fostering the operation and synergy of its functional units, indicating the system's support capacity for domestic high-quality development and global problem-solving.
Furthermore, this paper develops a comprehensive model following systems theory and self-organization theory, exploring the generation mechanism, key features, and evaluation dimensions of NIS overall performance. It argues that the generation of NIS overall performance results from the synergistic operation of domestic science, technology, industry, education, and finance systems, characterized by high efficiency, synergy, and openness. The generation process involves multi-system synergy, multi-chain integration, and continuous coupling and interaction with the international innovation system. Enhancing performance involves interactions and synergies among various stakeholders, the flow and combination of diverse elements, the complementarity and integration of multiple functions, and the coordination of strategies, plans, and policies between central and local governments.
This study expands the connotation of NIS overall performance from a domestic-international perspective and constructs an evaluation index system, addressing the gaps in existing research. The evaluation index system helps assess China's current NIS performance, identify key performance constraints, and guide reforms to overcome these barriers. Additionally, it serves as an important reference for future evaluations of NIS overall performance.
The findings suggest that the evaluation of NIS overall performance should encompass both domestic development and contributions to global problem-solving (e.g., climate change, poverty). Based on these two dimensions, this study evaluates NIS performance through "efficiency" and "enablement"."Efficiency" focuses on input-output relationships,while "enablement" assesses support for domestic high-quality development and global problem-solving. It selects indicators from renowned national innovation evaluation reports and identified key indicators using the group eigenvalue method and Pearson correlation analysis. The final indicator system comprises two dimensions which are further subdivided into seven indicators. Specifically, the "efficiency" dimension includes "institutional environment", "infrastructure", "R&D investment", "economic output" and "technological output". The "enablement" dimension consists of "supporting high-quality domestic development" and "promoting global problem solving".
As with all studies, the current study has limitations that provide avenues for future research. It constructs the indicator system for evaluating the overall performance of the NIS, but does not put the system into practical evaluation. Future research can focus on empirical evaluations of major countries, positioning China's NIS performance within the global context.