Abstract:    The ability of technological innovation can be directly related to the level of the economic and social development as well as the sustainable development of a region. What is more, it is closely related to the core competitiveness of a region and even of the whole country. In the process of building a community of the shared future for mankind, the scientific and technological innovation plays a quite important role as a driving force as well as a key to promoting the implementation of the innovation-driven development strategy. The quantitative measurement of the regional technological innovation capability has the ability to better make an evaluation and orientation to the innovation level in each region. Based on the available data of innovation activities in all provincial-level regions of China from 2008 to 2018, this paper not only takes the number of authorized patents as the main test index of regional technological innovation ability, but also analyzes the distribution characteristics of the order-scale distribution of the number of patents, and in the end makes a further understanding of the changing situation of technological innovation ability in each provincial-level region. 
   In the first place, this paper carries on the statistic and the comparisons to the number of patents in each provincial-level region, and then does an analysis about the certain impact of GDP and R & D investment on regional innovation. It can be found that the regional innovation level in our country is now suffering from the uncoordinated problems, but the unit data cannot evaluate the specific development well. Therefore, according to the above analysis and reasons, this paper puts forward a possible hypothesis that both the number and scale of authorized patents conform to the Zipf′s law. On the basis of the statistical data of all the 34 provincial-level regions in our country in the recent ten years, this paper can calculate and obtain the parameter value k of the Zipf′s law, which can be next divided into different scale areas so as to analyze the trend of the overall innovation concentration and the characteristics of its scale-order changes. 
   From the empirical analysis, it can be found that the scale of the number of authorized patents in China has the characteristics of segmentation and it can be roughly divided into two different scale areas, where Guangdong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and other fairly economically developed provincial-level regions can be taken as the first scale area, and Guangxi, Yunnan, Shanxi and other economically underdeveloped provincial-level regions as the second scale area. In addition, this paper analyzes the scope of the scale area, the characteristics of segmentation as well as the distribution of each scale area, in order to measure the changing situation of the technological innovation ability of provincial-level regions in the whole country. 
    In conclusion, based on the number of authorized patents, this paper analyzes the degree of innovation agglomeration in each region, and according to the empirical conclusion, it puts forward a few effective related suggestions for better strengthening the exchanges and cooperation and promoting the coordinated development between regions in China.

Key words: patent, Zipf′s law, innovation ability