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Venture capital and technology commercialization: evidence from China

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Abstract

Although the importance of venture capital has been recognized in innovation literature, we know relatively little about how and to what extent it influences regional technology commercialization. Using a city-level data set that includes 225 cities in China, we identify the possible economic channels through which regional venture capital development affects technology commercialization. Our findings indicate that cities with better developed venture capital market exhibit higher technology commercialization performance. Furthermore, enhancing technology search efficiency, strengthening collaboration between universities and businesses, and providing sufficient funding are three possible channels that allow venture capital to promote technology commercialization. Our results offer new insights into the effects of venture capital development on technology innovation, especially complementing the literature on innovation from the perspective of technology commercialization.

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Notes

  1. The index is sourced from Peking University Open Research Data (https://doi.org/10.18170/DVN/NJIVQB).

  2. According to the national statistical database query, in 2020, the number of domestic invention patents accepted was 1,344,817, and the number of domestic utility model patent applications accepted was 2,918,874, which is much higher than the former.

  3. Furthermore, it’s conceivable that different cities may have experienced policy shocks to varying degrees, not just whether they were exposed to them. Therefore, in the next section, we conduct a more nuanced examination using a generalized difference-in-differences (GDID) approach, accounting for the extent of policy impact. We also show that our results are very robust (see Sect. 4.2.2).

  4. We also provide the regression results based on the other instrumental variable (\(Return\)) in Table 20 of the “Appendix”. The results also support our conclusions.

  5. In 1995, China launched the “211 Program” to develop world-class universities and its 116 universities not only received substantial funding, but also house the most productive researchers and most advanced laboratories (Freeman and Huang, 2015).

  6. The “Patent Value” index developed by BEIJING INCOPAT TECHNOLOGY CO., LTD (incoPat), which includes more than 20 technical indicators such as technical stability, technical advancement, and scope of protection. The scores for all indicators varied from 1 to 10. The higher the score for a patent, the higher its value.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China (21CJL009) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (72141304, 72342022, 72271184), and the National Social Science Fund of China (19ZDA047). The authors contributed equally to this work.

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  1. College of Management and Economics, Tianjin University, 92, Weijin Road, Nankai District, Tianjin, 300072, China

    Yongjie Zhang, Qiaoran Meng & Dayong Liu

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  1. Yongjie Zhang
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Appendix

See Tables 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20.

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Zhang, Y., Meng, Q. & Liu, D. Venture capital and technology commercialization: evidence from China. J Technol Transf (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-024-10063-z

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