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Yin Ximing,Su Yaxin,Chen Jin,Chen Tailun
In the new development stage, science and technology innovation needs to go beyond the traditional technology-driven paradigm, seize the transformation opportunity of context-driven innovation, and realize the leap from catching up to leading innovation by taking advatage of China's super large market and rich application environment.Data has become a new productive factor and an important driving force for innovation in the era of digital economy. With the increasingly rapid development of technological innovation, greater changes in market demand and closer integration of demand side and supply side, how can we reconstruct technology system and business model to unleash the value of data element, and promote the iteration of technology, products and services by leveraging the multiple contexts? This has become a key and hot topic in innovation management and digital transformation study. #br#However, China's technological innovation policy and practice used to follow the traditional linear innovation paradigm, that is, from fundamental research to industrial commercialization, which is a technology-driven development paradigm in essence. This paradigm is confronted with critical problems such as long R&D cycle, sluggish technology iteration, lack of comprehensive and refined task design for major national strategical objectives,etc. It is likely to fall into the “innovation dilemma”, thus hindering the transformation from innovation catchup to global innovation leadership. In this situation, how can the government and leading technological firms jointly open and build diversified innovation contexts, strengthen the design of context tasks and the reconstruction of innovation systems? The answer shall be the key to solve the problems of technology commercialization, and accelerate the digital transformation as well as promote the healthy and sustainable development of innovation ecosystem and platform economy. After reviewing the existing innovation paradigms and looking forward to its future research and practice frontier, this paper draws the theory and practice of innovation-driven development in the era of digital economy, and systematically discusses the connotation and features, theoretical logic, innovation path and typical practice of context-driven innovation. Specifically, context-driven innovation (CDI) is the process of applying existing technologies to specific contexts or scenarios to create greater value. It is also the process of promoting the integration and co-creation of strategy, technology, organization, market demand and various innovation elements based on future trends and visionary needs, therefore coping with the technological bottlenecks, and creating new technologies, new products, new channels, new processes and even new markets. #br#This paper contributes to the innovation theory development, national innovation system research and innovation practice in the digital era in three ways. First, this study explores both challenges and improvement opportunities to existing paradigms in the era of digital economy. Then it combines the systematic and holistic thinking in Eastern philosophy, and proposes a new innovation paradigm, namely,context-driven innovation (CDI). It is the two-wheel drive of technological innovation and context demand under the guidance of application context support and mission strategy. Context-driven innovation is an original theoretical paradigm that conforms to the development of the digital economy, meets the needs of enterprise technological innovation management, and supports the growth of industrial resilience, regional sustainable and high-quality development. It also provides insights on the construction of a global scientific and technological powerhouse, as well as brand-new innovative policy design and practical thinking to further optimize the global innovation leadership of enterprises and industries, enhance regional and national innovation capabilities, and promote the construction of a community with a shared future for mankind. Second, context-driven innovation emphasizes the context-driven and mission-oriented significance, and it has pioneering, strategic, diversified, precise, holistic, and resilient characteristics, which are of great practical value for understanding both China's prominent innovation practices and global important and new innovation practices, helping managers and policymakers to improve their innovation capabilities based on contexts and strategies, and realizing future insights and global innovation leadership. Finally, context-driven innovation provides policy-oriented enlightenment, and has important implications for the state and local governments to target major contexts and optimize top-level strategic design to achieve a high level of scientific and technological self-reliance and self-improvement.#br#