A new typology and transition of innovation policy instruments in China: Evidences from the new energy vehicle industry

Among several typologies of innovation policy instruments, the most frequently used one is technology-push v.s. demand-pull. But this typology has some drawbacks. This paper proposes new typologies which classify innovation policy instruments into government-led versus market led, and product-oriented versus user-oriented. We posit that the innovation policy instruments of China have transited from government-led to market-led, and from focusing on product-oriented solely to on both product-oriented and user-oriented. In order to testify the proposition, we analyze 54 main policy documents of the new energy vehicle industry in China quantitatively by coding and counting applied policy instruments from 1999 to 2014, and the empirical result supports the proposition.