Patent Stocks, Invention Flows, and Commercialization Efficiency: A Dynamic Network DEA Analysis of Chinese Provincial Innovation Systems

This preprint investigates how contemporary invention flows and accumulated patent stocks shape commercialization efficiency across Chinese provincial innovation systems. The study applies a non-oriented, variable-returns-to-scale dynamic two-stage network slacks-based measure (SBM) to 30 mainland Chinese provincial-level regions over 2011–2024, covering 420 province-year observations. Invention applications are modeled as a fixed contemporaneous interstage flow, patents in force as a desirable intertemporal carry-over, and new-product sales as the primary commercialization output. The results show mean system, knowledge-generation, and commercialization efficiencies of 0.646, 0.582, and 0.729, respectively. Patent-stock magnitude is not significantly associated with commercialization efficiency across provinces (Spearman ρ = 0.288, p = 0.123). The analysis further shows that provincial rankings are comparatively stable across several specifications, while efficiency levels and stage-specific diagnoses vary under alternative dynamic, annual, sequential, and global reference technologies. The study contributes a flow-stock and benchmark-sensitive perspective on regional innovation efficiency by distinguishing current inventive activity from accumulated technological capability and by demonstrating that the choice of temporal reference technology materially affects the diagnosis of commercialization efficiency and provincial innovation bottlenecks. Robustness analyses consider alternative scale assumptions, output definitions, carry-over treatments, stage weights, winsorization, and influential reference trajectories. The accompanying reproducibility materials include the analytical dataset, source register, variable definitions, transformations, computational code, verification logs, and machine-readable outputs required to reproduce the reported analyses. Keywords: Dynamic network DEA; innovation value chain; patent stocks; invention flows; commercialization efficiency; innovation efficiency; Chinese provinces; technology management; benchmarking.