Abstract:

 In the past five years, the number of China′s maker space has achieved exponential growth. More than 5,000 maker spaces in China have become an important emerging force in the science and technology service industry after enterprise accelerators and science and technology business incubators, and become an important part of the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem in the entrepreneurial society. However, what is not matched with the rapid development of the number is that the overall innovation efficiency level of maker space is low, how to improve its innovation output has become an important issue in the practice of maker space innovation driving strategy.
Few existing research literature study innovation output influence factors.Because of the limitation of methods those paper primary focus on the "net effect" of individual factors, or at most three variables of regulating effect or mediation effect, and ignore the regional atmosphere factors such as the scale of regional maker space and the degree of regional intellectual property protection，lacking of a consistent framework of influencing factors based on authoritative theory so that can′t fully explain the complexity of cause and effect between various factors and their "synergistic effect", not to mention answer the question of "how to improve the innovation output of the maker space" from the perspective of system integration. But as innovation and entrepreneurship platform, maker space has ecosystem attributes and its innovation output is affected by multiple factors such as government, regional environment and regional environmental atmosphere, and the service behavior of the maker space. These factors have complex and nonlinear interaction relationship. Answer the question of "how to improve the innovation output of the maker space" need to adopt the method of "integration synergy" to study the interactive relations between the influencing factors. Fuzzy-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) is an effective method to explore "synergistic effect" and "interactive relationship", and has been widely used in various fields of organization management in recent years. Based on this, this article adopts fsQCA method to carry out system integration research, to answer the question of why the innovation output of the maker space of some provinces and cities is high, so as to make up for the shortage of existing literature.
Based on the view of system integration, This article selects the government′s subsidy policy, intellectual property protection, the size of the maker space of every area as well as all the platform of economic service, social services, capability services as the influence factors for the innovation output, building an analysis model of influencing factors of innovation output, takes the maker spaces of 31 provinces and cities as the case, and applies the fsQCA method to study the collaborative model of influencing factors of innovation output of maker space, and then explores the incubation model of innovation output to reveal the guiding factors and driving forces of high innovation output in mass innovation space and enrich the research literature on innovation output from the perspective of incubation system and structure, and provides theoretical and policy suggestions for the practice of innovation driven incubation in mass innovation space.
The results showed that:(1) The innovation output of maker space has the characteristics of "multiple concurrency" and "the same route". There are four combinations of government policy and the combination of platform services can lead to the maker space high innovation output, and can be further summarized as "government-driven" and "space-driven" type two kinds of incubation model. The "government-driven" type is mainly rely on government subsidy and intellectual property protection to improve innovation output; The "space-driven" type is mainly rely on capacity service and economic service assisted to improve innovation output, among which the space-driven model is the main model of China′s maker spaces to achieve high innovation output. This discovery is a new attempt to explain the innovation output of maker space from the system integration perspective, which is also a rich and complementary research result of innovation output based on contingency perspective from the perspective of structure-performance relationship. Therefore, to some extent, it promotes the transformation of innovation output research from contingency perspective to holistic and structural perspective; (2) There is a complicated substitution or/and complementary relationship among the influencing factors, and there is a substitution relationship between the government subsidy and the services of the platform under certain conditions. It deepens the research on the interaction between the influencing factors of innovation output from multiple perspectives and has great benefit to the maker space to carry out targeted incubation services based on its own advantages to enhance innovation output; (3) Combined with the existing theoretical explanation and the typical case analysis, this article puts forward three research propositions which have certain potential and can be tested. The first proposition is under the circumstance that the incubation behavior of maker space is not strong enough, the government′s strengthening of subsidies and intellectual property rights protection is crucial to the innovation output of maker space. The second proposition is in the case of limited government support, the capacity services and economic services of the regional maker space are crucial to the innovation output. The third proposition is there is a complex alternative and complementary relationship among the innovation influencing factors of maker space. Under certain conditions, there is an alternative relationship between the government subsidy and the incubation service of maker space.
This article is the first to introduce the QCA method into the research on the impact of innovation incubation, which provides a holistic perspective for understanding and explaining the causal relationship among the factors affecting innovation output. It makes up for the lack of completeness of the existing literature on the factors affecting the innovation output of maker space and makes the system elements of the innovation output of maker space more complete. In addition, the substitution or complementary relationship between the two kinds of influencing factors is analyzed, thus deepening the interaction between multiple theoretical explanations. The research results enriched the literature on influencing factors of innovation output from the perspective of systematic collaboration, and provided empirical guidance for the innovation incubation practice and policy making of maker space.

Key words: maker space, innovative output, government subsidies, incubation service, fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA)