INVITED ARTICLE
Zhang Yang, Wang Yizhu, Li Danyang
[Purpose/Significance] Against the backdrop of the profound shifts of the global innovation landscape and China's accelerated implementation of the innovation-driven development strategy, patents have evolved beyond legal instruments into core carriers of innovation and key indicators of regional competitiveness. While existing evaluation systems generally rely on a solid tripartite framework—comprising legal, technological, and economic values—they frequently struggle with dynamic adaptability in complex macro-strategic contexts. Traditional endogenous indicators fail to capture the forward-looking strategic orientation embedded in dynamic policy adjustments. Grounded in the Technological Innovation System (TIS) theory, this study argues that high-value patents should not only fulfill technical and legal criteria but also demonstrate alignment with macro-strategic needs. Therefore, this study aims to construct a quantitative analytical framework and an evaluation system for patent value that can dynamically adapt to macro contexts and integrate strategic perspectives. [Method/Process] Taking the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) —characterized by cross-institutional, cross-regional, and cross-industrial collaborative innovation—as an empirical case, this study designs a research path of "knowledge discovery—rule mapping—dynamic weighting—empirical validation. " Specifically, in the knowledge discovery phase, the study combines the BERTopic model with rule-engine technology to mitigate the semantic sparsity problem of traditional bag-of-words models, effectively extracting latent strategic themes from exogenous policy texts. In the rule mapping phase, these themes are mapped into five supplementary categories of strategic value: industrial policy responsiveness, regional collaborative radiation, policy empowerment intensity, sustainable-development drive, and technical-rule dominance, which are further refined into ten secondary indicators. Finally, in the dynamic weighting phase, utilizing exogenous policy texts as the core benchmark, the study couples the rule engine with a time-decay coefficient to design a dynamic entropy-weight model. This process addresses static lag issues and constructs a comprehensive evaluation system encompassing legal, technological, economic, and strategic values. [Result/Conclusion] Multiple empirical and robustness tests based on the GBA patent samples indicate that the proposed evaluation system possesses demonstrates strong construct validity and criterion-related predictive validity. The empirical results verify the significant marginal explanatory power of strategic value as a supplementary dimension. Furthermore, heterogeneity analysis reveals distinct institutional constraints: strategic value exhibits a negative impact on patent transfer rates across all samples, but the magnitude is significantly stronger for non-enterprise entities (e. g., universities and research institutes) due to constraints regarding risks of state-owned asset losses and maturity levels, whereas enterprises tend to adopt defensive strategies to maintain core competitiveness. Overall, this measurement paradigm can identify core patent assets highly aligned with macro-strategic orientations, effectively broadening the measurement dimensions of traditional evaluation systems and enhancing their dynamic adaptability in complex policy contexts, thereby providing a quantitative decision-making reference for innovation-resource allocation. [Innovation/Value] This study makes three main contributions. First, theoretically, it breaks through the traditional micro-level evaluation perspective by establishing a structural mapping between macro-policy semantics and micro-patent evaluation. By introducing "Strategic Value" based on the TIS theory, it extends the evaluation dimension to macro-strategic alignment. Second, methodologically, it integrates the BERTopic model with a customized rule engine to achieve a rigorous and objective mapping from unstructured policy intentions to structured indicator weights. Third, in terms of evaluation logic, by adopting exogenous policy texts as the core benchmark for weighting rather than excessively relying on endogenous data, the study mitigates homological endogeneity bias. This creates a highly transparent, traceable, and dynamic measurement paradigm capable of objectively responding to macro-strategic guidance. [Insufficient/Improvement] Despite these theoretical and methodological advancements, certain limitations remain to be addressed in future research. First, the spatial generalizability of the evaluation system requires further verification. Future studies could apply this measurement paradigm to other strategic regions, such as the Yangtze River Delta and the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, to confirm the generalizability and robustness of the evaluation logic through cross-regional horizontal comparisons. Second, due to the long lifecycle of patent value realization, current cross-sectional data cannot fully capture dynamic value trajectories. Subsequent research should establish long-term panel databases and employ methodologies such as survival analysis to conduct full-life-cycle tracking tracking of high-value patents' conversion rates, implementation rates, and ultimate economic benefits.