Abstract:     The policies formulated by the local governments are the key factors to promote the development of regional innovation, and science and technology policies play a vital role in enhancing the independent innovation capability of industries. However, policy is often not a single form, but a combination of multiple policies interacts with innovation. Simply adding an indiscriminate number of policy instruments at the same time may reduce the effectiveness of the policy mix. This paper made an empirical study on the role of the characteristics of local science and technology policy mix in industrial innovation. Taking the science and technology policies in Sichuan Province from 2012 to 2020 as a case, the authors of this paper divided the policies into supply policy, demand policy and environment policy with text analysis method. A model was constructed to study the influence of the comprehensiveness, balance and consistency of different policy mix characteristics and the internal combination of the same policy tool on industrial innovation. The results showed that:First, when the local science and technology policy mix is characterized by a more balanced use of demand-led, technology-driven, and environmentally supportive tools, its positive impact on industrial innovation tends to be greater. The empirical analysis showed that the comprehensiveness, balance and consistency of the three types of policy mixes of supply, demand and environment have significant impacts on patent output and new product output value, indicating that the characteristics of different types of science and technology mixes in Sichuan Province have positive impacts on industrial innovation. As the number of policies increases, the interaction of policies becomes more and more complex. Existing studies have shown that multiple policy tools in different regions will influence and interact with each other, and different policy combinations will have positive or negative impacts on innovation. A more balanced expansion of the use of the three types of science and technology policy tools and improvement of their synergy will effectively drive industrial innovation.Second, a more comprehensive local science and technology policy mix could strengthen industrial innovation activities to generate new technological outputs and economic outputs. The empirical analysis showed that the mix of supply-oriented, demand-oriented and environment-oriented policies has a significant impact on patent output and new product output value, indicating that the science and technology policy mixes of Sichuan Province can help enterprises carry out scientific and technological innovation activities, build a new engine to drive industrial development, and provide solid support for the development. A more comprehensive policy mix could thus promote local innovation.Third, simply adding a large number of supply - and demand-oriented policy tools at the same time may reduce the effectiveness of the policy mix and may often fail to have a positive impact on industrial innovation. The empirical analysis showed that the consistency of the internal tool mix of demand-oriented policies has no significant impact on the output value of patents and new products, and the balance and consistency of the internal tool mix of supply-oriented policies has no significant impact on the output value of new products, indicating that when designing the policy mix, strengthening the market incentive and developing the innovation ability of new products and technologies, the balance and synergy between these two policy instruments becomes a key feature that needs to be addressed, and simply adding an indiscriminate number of policy instruments at the same time may reduce the effectiveness of the policy mix.

Key words: local science and technology policy, policy mix characteristics, industrial innovation, Sichuan Province