Human Capital Structure and Innovation Efficiency Under Technological Progress: Evidence from China

This paper innovatively defines the structure of human capital based on existing theories and use the heterogeneous stochastic frontier model to test the relationship between various types of human capital and innovation. It is found that with the progress of technology, the structure of human capital and the mechanism of promoting innovation have undergone profound changes. Together with commercial leasing human capital, financial human capital, and entrepreneurs, information human capital and transportation human capital participate in innovation activities and create a new collaborative space, which in turn helps to spread the value of innovation and influence the effectiveness of the entire innovation system. This study enriches the theoretical research on the mechanism of human capital promoting innovation in the information age and provides new insight to explain the imbalance between human capital input and innovation output. Based on the theory of innovation chain value and flow space, this study redefines the connotation of innovative human capital structure by distinguishing the nature of innovation activities. This study also reveals the difference in the influence of human capital structure on different types of innovation activities. This study partly explains the problem of increasing human capital input but decreasing innovation efficiency in developing countries. Therefore, from a macro perspective, our research provides guidance for understanding the transformation of innovation under the background of technological progress and formulating effective urban innovation strategies for managers. Plain language summary Existing studies show that human capital is the core element of innovation activities, and the more human capital investment a country has, the stronger its innovation ability will be. However, there is still no consistent explanation of who promotes innovation and how. This makes it difficult for researchers to explain the problem of increasing human capital investment but decreasing innovation efficiency in some developing countries. This paper innovatively considers the impact of technological progress on innovation activities, and holds that technological progress changes the structure of human capital for innovation, thus affecting the efficiency of innovation. The analysis based on stochastic frontier model proves this view. The conclusion of empirical analysis shows that the total human capital input is not the more the be