Abstract:    Intellectual property protection is an important institutional arrangement to drive innovative development. It is an important issue about how to promote regional technological innovation from incremental to quality improvement by strengthening judicial protection of intellectual property rights in the context of China′s high-quality development. Based on the panel data of 260 prefecture-level cities in China from 2011 to 2021, this paper evaluated the impact of judicial protection of intellectual property on the quality of regional technological innovation by employing the DID model and taking the establishment of local intellectual property courts as a quasi-natural experiment. The results showed that the establishment of local intellectual property courts can significantly promote regional high-quality technological innovation and effectively inhibit regional low-quality technological innovation, thus showing a positive effect on the quality of regional technological innovation. The mechanism test showed that the judicial protection of intellectual property enhances the quality of regional technological innovation by enhancing the demonstration effect of technology market and improving the regulation effect of innovation environment. Further analysis showed that the role of local intellectual property courts in improving the quality of regional technological innovation is heterogeneous in terms of urban administrative rank, geographical location and initial level of intellectual property protection, and the role of the city where the courts are established in improving the quality of technological innovation is stronger than that of the jurisdiction city. The research conclusions will provide policy guidance for deepening the reform of intellectual property judicial system, optimizing the market innovation environment and smoothing the way of knowledge spillover, and they will provide reference for implementing the innovation-driven development strategy and achieving the goal of high-quality development.

Key words:  judicial protection of intellectual property, local intellectual property court, regional technological innovation quality, DID model