At present, as the trend of economic globalization and regional economic integration becomes increasingly prominent, the recovery in advanced economies such as the U.S. and EU is relatively weak, and more seriously, the adverse effects of the economic recession on these countries′ industry development are continuing. At the same time, with the rapid development of economic industries in emerging countries such as China and India, the global institutions of international power are undergoing a profound restructuring, and more importantly, of particular concern is that the geopolitical game between countries and groups of countries is rapidly intensifying. All of these are hindering the development of global economy industry. In addition, due to the differentiation of innovation diffusion, the global geo-economic structure caused by the difference in industrial development will vary significantly. A large number of previous studies had shown that the international geopolitical position of each country will vary with the interests of its economic and industrial structure. In other words, the global industrial structure will have a significant impact on the geopolitical stance of each country or region. This will not only affect the current development of international relations among regions, but also seriously affect the sustained growth of the global economy. Therefore, in this context, for the related stakeholders, it is of great practical significance to discuss the evolution of global industrial structure driven by innovation diffusion. 

Overall, using theoretical analysis or statistical analysis models, previous studies primarily focused on the impacts of innovation diffusion on the evolution of regional industrial structure at the macro level, but further expansion and deepening are needed in the following two aspects. The one aspect is that the evolution of global industrial structure is not revealed from the perspective of the whole world in the prior studies. Another aspect is that studies regarding how firms′ innovation diffusion affect the evolution of macro industrial structure from the micro level are relatively small. In addition, with the advent of the era of knowledge and information economy, economic and industrial competition between countries is becoming also more prominent. In order to make the development of regional industrial structure gain more advantages in the global geo-economic competition, for the related stakeholders, performing actively technical innovation to promote transformation and development of regional industrial structure has become an important strategic measure in various regions. In the context of new economic geography, technical innovation diffusion occurs and develops in a multi-regional environment, and it could promote the transformation and upgrading of regional economic industrial structure through driving the evolution of industrial structure, and thus a new global geo-economic industrial structure characteristics among regions could be formed accordingly. In other words, firms′ technical innovation diffusion may bring about a new round of restructuring of the industrial structure of the global economy. Currently, there are few studies on this problem, and this paper attempts to make up for it. 

Given that, based on the method of agent-based simulation, through combining and integrating firm behavior in terms of innovation diffusion at the micro-scale, this paper conducts a new analytical framework to further explore the impact of large sets of heterogeneous firms′ behavior on the evolution of regional industrial structure, and then examine the global industrial structure evolution driven by innovation diffusion. Our primarily conclusions are as follows.

One finding from this study is that, for different countries of regions in the worlds, process innovation is more conductive to promoting their secondary industry development, while product innovation would be more helpful for driving their industry structure development in terms of tertiary industry. Specific to see, driven by process innovation, the output share of the primary industry and the tertiary industry in these regions decreased, and the output share of the secondary industry increased. Driven by product innovation, except for the United States, the share of output in the primary industry declined slightly. The output share of the primary industry and the tertiary industry for all other countries or regions increased significantly. Also, the output share of the secondary industry in all countries declined to some extent.Driven by both product innovation and process innovation, for the developing countries like China and India, from the perspective of output structure, the output share of the primary industry and the tertiary industry increased, while the output share of the secondary industry decreased. Generally, compared to driven by process innovation and driven by product innovation, driven by both product innovation and process innovation is more conducive to promoting regional industrial structure upgrading. 

Another important finding is that, for some developing countries like China, Russia and India, a downward trend regarding the ratio between economic output in the primary industry and total economic output in the national economy is particularly apparent. However, an upward trend of economic output from the tertiary industry in China is the most obvious, followed by the U.S and Russia, respectively. Furthermore, as for economic output in the secondary industry from most regions in the world expect for the U.S and Russia, the share of economic output in the primary industry to total economic output in the national economy all is in a rising trend. In general, our results find that driven by firms′ technical innovation diffusion (both product innovation and process innovation) is more beneficial to promoting the global industrial structure toward the tertiary industry evolution and development. In terms of innovation governance policy, this result could provide an important theoretical basis for the related stakeholders to formulate global economic industrial governance policies.