Research on the Performance Evaluation of Urban Innovation Spaces: A Case Study in Harbin

Innovation has become a pivotal factor in driving economic growth for cities and regions. Urban innovation spaces are urban spaces where innovative economic and industrial activities, such as research, teaching, and high-tech manufacturing, are clustered. They have become hot research topics in recent years. Evaluating the performance of urban innovation spaces to promote rational resource allocation and enhance land development potential has become a critical task in urban planning. However, existing studies suffer from insufficient depth of research scales and a lack of quantitative indicators and data analysis. In response to the above gaps, this study constructed a framework for evaluating the performance of urban innovation spaces from 25 indicators of five major types, including core elements of innovation, entrepreneurship support institutions, service facilities, external environments, and diversities, aiming to quantify the performance heterogeneity of innovation spaces at the micro scale. This study took Harbin as an example and employed the entropy, kernel density estimation, and entropy-weighted TOPSIS methods, identifying four high-scoring areas of innovation spaces—the Science and Technology Innovation City area, the High-tech Industrial Development area, the core area of the old city, and the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute area—which were divided into three types: the Entrepreneurial leading area, Environmental Support area, and Balanced Development area. Finally, this study analyzed the interaction between each indicator. It was found that the correlation between the core elements of innovation and the indicators of entrepreneurship support institutions was strong and had a high degree of importance. The correlation of different types of service facility indicators is quite different, and the external environment indicators and diversity indicators are mainly affected by other indicators, especially the core elements of innovation and entrepreneurship support institutions. This paper provides a valuable tool for the performance evaluation of urban innovation spaces for researchers and urban planning decision makers.