This article compares China with the forefront innovative countries, and studies the prospects and challenges of China's entry into the forefront in the new era. The main conclusions are as follows. Firstly, China's total R&D investment, the number of patents and papers are already in the forefront. Secondly, there is a big gap between China and innovative countries in terms of indicators such as the proportion of enterprises'basic R&D investment, the ratio of invention patents, the density of R&D personnel, and the citation rate of papers, and it is difficult for the former to catch up the latter. Thirdly, the level of intellectual property protection and industry-university-research cooperation need to be improved. Therefore, the key to China's 2030-2035 ranking among the top innovative countries lies in optimizing the structure of innovation input and improving the quality of innovation results.

innovative country  /  global innovation index  /  innovation input  /  innovation output