Dual policy-market orchestration : new R&D institutions bridging innovation and entrepreneurship

This study investigates how new R&D institutions mediate policy-market disjunctures to foster integrated innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystems. Employing a longitudinal case analysis (2013-2023) of the Jiangsu Industrial Technology Research Institute (JITRI), we delineate a three-phase evolutionary process: (1) an initial government-dominated phase, stimulating foundational capability development through contract R&D; (2) a subsequent marketization phase, enabling systemic resource integration via co-creation centers and global networks; and (3) a culminating synergy phase, where policy-market alignment facilitates ecosystem optimization through crowdsourced R&D and cross-domain collaboration. Three core mechanisms underpin this adaptation: policy-market coupling (providing external momentum), endogenous capability development (absorption to innovation), and dynamic resource orchestration (acquisition to optimization). JITRI's hybrid governance model demonstrates that stage-contingent interventions-specifically, policy anchoring in early stages followed by market-responsive resource allocation-effectively transmute inherent tensions into productive synergies. These findings yield implementable frameworks for structuring innovative ecosystems and underscore the necessity for comparative studies to establish broader theoretical generalizability.