Mapping China's innovation network: Empowering research with AI-driven web data and analytics
ISTARI collaborated with researchers from leading institutions, including Harvard, to map China's innovation ecosystem across 3M+ firms using web data, hyperlink networks, and XAI analytics. The project revealed key innovation drivers through AI-powered network modeling and a corporate innovation index.
24 November 2025Mapping China's innovation network: Empowering research with AI-driven web data and analytics
ISTARI collaborated with researchers from leading institutions, including Harvard, to map China's innovation ecosystem across 3M+ firms using web data, hyperlink networks, and XAI analytics. The project revealed key innovation drivers through AI-powered network modeling and a corporate innovation index.
The Challenge
Uncovering hidden connections in an enormous innovation ecosystem
A team of researchers from top-tier universities—including Harvard University—wanted to analyze how innovation emerges and spreads across China's tech sector. The goal was to map company relationships across millions of firms and understand how dimensions like geographic, technological, and cognitive proximity influence innovation. Conventional datasets and methods weren't scalable or granular enough to capture the dynamics at play in this complex and highly interlinked ecosystem.
Our Solution
Mass-scale web crawling combined with XAI and deep learning
ISTARI provided direct access to an expansive web dataset covering over 3 million Chinese technology companies, including hyperlink networks and company-level textual data. Using the webAI platform, the researchers employed Explainable AI (XAI) and deep neural network models to perform a deep analysis of network structures. Patent data was integrated seamlessly with web information to build a multi-dimensional corporate innovation index. This approach allowed the team to identify nonlinear relationships and innovation patterns often missed by conventional analysis methods.
The Impact
Powerful data infrastructure to guide innovation policy and planning
The research team completed a high-resolution map of China's innovation landscape, revealing clusters of activity and the proximity factors that significantly drive innovation. ISTARI's data infrastructure saved extensive manual labor and improved analytical precision, enabling the researchers to visualize complex corporate networks in real time. These insights proved valuable for policymakers and planners seeking to design stronger, more connected urban innovation ecosystems—contributing to sustainable growth and competitiveness in the digital economy.
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