Abstract:      In recent years, China has been continuously strengthening and enriching the policy tools and market tools to promote enterprise innovation, and the government and academia have increasingly focused on the effectiveness and precision of combining these two types of tools. In order to investigate the relationship between policy tools, market tools and R&D activities of high-tech enterprises, it is imperative to analyze the combination of effective tools that facilitate R&D activities of high-tech enterprises at different stages from an innovation process perspective and conduct a comprehensive analysis of the complex mechanism underlying it. This paper focused on Zhongguancun high-tech enterprises as the research subject, and adopted the fsQCA method which can effectively address the complex relationship between various variables for empirical test and complex mechanism analysis. It was found that a single tool on supporting R&D activities of enterprises is limited, and it is necessary to adopt appropriate combinations of policy tools and market tools according to the characteristics of the innovation process, so as to effectively promote enterprise R&D activities. Specifically, the combination of double tax incentives and credit-led driven tools should be adopted on the input side and output side of the innovation process, and the combination of additional deduction policies and credit-led driven tools should be adopted on the income side, and the implementation effect of the above configurations varies with the scale of enterprise assets and the level of human resources. The conclusion of this paper is valuable for enhancing the rational comprehension of the intricate mechanism that facilitates the R&D activities of high-tech enterprises, and it will provide insights for enhancing the efficacy of policy tools and market tools.

Key words: innovation process, high-tech enterprise, R&D activity of enterprise, policy and market tool mix, fsQCA