Effects of Indigenous Innovation Policy on the S & T Outputs in China Evidence from the Higher Education System

This paper evaluated the effects of indigenous innovation policies changes in 1996 and 2002 on the S & T outputs in the Chinese higher education system. I used interrupted time series design with yearly measures of number of SCI articles, average citation per item in 5 years, number of invention patent application accepted and invention patent granted from 1980 to 2008. The results showed statistically significant increases in the four output measures after the 1996 and 2002 innovation policies were adopted by the Chinese universities. In terms of effect size, the increases were 133% and 82% in number of SCI articles and 41% and 37% in citation impact for the two policy changes. The effect sizes are more noteworthy with 177% and 202% increases in patent applied 146% and 256% increase in patent granted for the two policy changes. The results supported all hypotheses and are basically consisted with prior research done by other scholars. However, small size sample and no control group are the two limitations of this research and future research could consider about the possibility to combine time series data and cross-sector data.