We study China’s organization and governance of innovation in this paper from a policy foresight perspective. With its experience of planning systems, China resorts to state intervention in economic and social activities, which profoundly includes research and innovation. The government organizes and governs a vast national science and technology system, most of which is in the state sector, demonstrating the importance and relevance of its research and innovation policy. In this study, 343 innovation policy items, collected in our sample for the period 1990 and 2013, have been scrutinized in a three dimension analytical framework for policy instruments, objectives and implementation. We then abstract and conceptualize the results and findings arrived at the study. Targeted and general purpose policy instruments are categorized. Patterns have emerged revealing the linkages between the targeted policy instruments and the policy objectives. The results and findings based conceptualization contributes to innovate the thinking in innovation policy configuration to advance national innovation constructs.

Introduction and background of study

Technological advance and innovative application of science is pivotal to economic growth. ‘Science and technology (S&T) give capital a power of expansion independent of the given magnitude of the capital actually functioning’, Marx maintained (Marx, 1867, p418). Schumpeter (1942) conceived creative destruction from exploring Marx’s analysis of bourgeois society, its relations of production and means of production and of exchange. The process of creative destruction incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one (Schumpeter, 1942, p83). Henceforth one of the major driving forces for economic development is innovation and the associated research and development (R&D), while innovation policy fosters R&D.1 We pay attention to China’s innovation policy that is instrumental to implementing medium to long-term S&T planning frameworks specifically in this study, given its status as the largest emerging economy and the second largest economy in the world. Moreover, with its experience of planning systems, China resorts to state intervention in research and innovation. The government organizes and governs a vast national science and technology system, most of which is in the state sector. Nonetheless, national planning in science, technology and innovation (STI) fields is not unique to China; it’s not unique to the former planning economies either. As early as in the 1980s, Roessner (1985) examined the efforts in the US to initiate and implement a national innovation policy, though his assessment of the prospects for a national innovation policy was rather negative at the time.