Framework for building national innovation capacity in China

With the view of becoming an innovation-driven nation by 2020, national innovation capacity (NIC) building has become a key issue for China to transform its development pattern. A series of fundamental questions, such as how to build NIC and what roles should the government play, are faced by both the government and academia. The current literature concerning NIC mainly focuses on measurement and determinant analysis, which cannot give direct and sufficient support to policy making. This paper tries to fill the gap between theoretical analysis of NIC and policies for building NIC by proposing a conceptual framework, in which the inherent connections between innovation capacity indicators and policy options for building NIC are investigated. Policy measures for building NIC in China are discussed in the end of this paper.