Abstract:     In the knowledge economy era, the innovation mode has experienced a radical change from the past linear innovation to the current triple helix (TH) one by which the economic and academic organizations achieve high penetration and organizational boundaries become blurred. In this context, a considerable volume of studies have been devoted to investigate how the TH interactions between/among academic organizations (such as universities and research institutes) and economic ones (industries) promotes knowledge application and commercialization. Yet, the extant studies neglected an important issue, namely, the ‘reverse feeding’ effect of TH interactions on knowledge creation by academic organizations, therefor leaving a little understanding in respect to the impact of TH interactions on knowledge creation.
In this paper, we attempt to fill this prominent gap by exploring whether the TH non-linear interactions among Industry–University–Research Institutes (IUR) are conducive to the promotion of knowledge creation by academic organizations in China. Specifically, Chinese Double First-Class universities which act as the important knowledge creation actors in national innovation system are taken as the research sample, and the mutual redundancy indicator developed by Leydesdorff and Ivanova is employed to measure the dynamic trend of TH interactions of Chinese Double First-Class universities with industries and research institutes. Furthermore, the regression analysis is implemented to empirically investigate the TH interactions′ effects on knowledge creation, which contributes to clarifying the following topics: (1) whether the TH interactions among the Chinese Double First-Class universities, industries and research institutes are beneficial for the improvement of Chinese Double First-Class universities′ knowledge outputs; (2) whether the relationship between research investment and knowledge outputs of Chinese Double First-Class universities is positively moderated by the TH interactions among the Chinese Double First-Class universities, industries and research institutes.
    The results show that the bilateral coupling relationship between the academic organizations becomes stronger and stronger. This not only helps to create more knowledge, but also moderates the relationship between research investments and knowledge outputs in a positive manner. Moreover, the bilateral interactions between the academic and economic organizations have been increasingly decoupled, and these bilateral interactions not only exert a negative effect on knowledge creation, but also negatively regulate the relationship between research investment and knowledge outputs in an indirect manner. In addition, the trilateral interactions among IUR become decoupled, and these trilateral interactions have no significant impact on knowledge creation.
    It should be noted that our research findings are inconsistent with the extant studies which were implemented in the context of Western countries. This may be attributed to a possible reason in respect to the sharp contrast scenarios between the Western countries and China where the TH interactions among innovative organizations fall into the different positions along the innovation value chain, i.e., the Western countries are on the upstream whereas China is on downstream, resulting into different manners by which TH interactions exert ‘reverse feeding’ effect on knowledge creation in different country contexts. 
    This paper contributes to extant literature in two aspects: Firstly, compared with the extant research which largely explores how the TH interactions promote the new knowledge created by academic organizations successfully transferred to economic organizations, and tends to focus on whether the TH interactions have an impact on technological innovation performance from the research perspective of economic organizations, this paper mainly investigates the feedback effect of TH interactions on conducting scientific research and knowledge creation from the research perspective of academic organizations, therefore enriching the TH innovative research. Secondly, in contrast to abundant research which is limited to depicting TH interactions rather than exploring their effects, this paper not only reveals the bilateral and trilateral interactions between/among the innovative organizations, but also further implements an in-depth study on the impact of TH interactions on knowledge creation.
    In summary, this paper devotes on investigating the academic effects of TH non-linear interactions among innovative organizations in the context of China, which presents some important implications for theoretical, practical and political circles. In particular, the results of our study may be of interest to the China′s policy makers who strive to enhance the national innovation capability by strengthening TH non-linear interactions, resulting in an‘innovation-oriented’ country in the future.

Key words: triple helix interactions among industry-university-research institutes, academic organization, knowledge creation, Double First-Class universities