Abstract: This study investigated the effect of regional technical criticality and genericness on the industrial innovation performance. The findings offer valuable insights for guiding targeted industrial innovation, refining technological development strategies, and optimizing resource allocation. This study took the Chinese Fuel Cell Vehicle industry as the example and represented technical units using 4-digit IPC codes and constructed a multi-layer co-occurrence network that focuses on various segments of the industry chain. This framework enabled the development of metrics to measure technical criticality and genericness, capturing the intricacies of regional technical characteristics. Regional technical advancements were subsequently assessed both temporally and spatially using provincial panel data from China spanning 2010 to 2021.

Key words: Technical criticality, Technical genericness, Industrial innovation, Regional innovation, Innovation performance