Abstract With the implementation of innovation-driven development strategy, evaluating the performance of its implementation has important policy implications. From the perspective of coupling theory, this article deconstructs innovation-driven development into coupling relationship between innovation and development systems, and suggests that coupling degree and coupling coordination degree can be used as the innovation-driven development evaluation scale. Following this logic, we explore the coupling mechanism of regional innovation and development systems, and conduct an empirical analysis on China provincial innovation-driven development performance by using coupling evaluation model. The results show that most of China provincial innovation systems lag behind the development systems in the comprehensive development level, but the speed is faster than the development systems’; China’s innovation-driven development performance is upgrading gradually with a fluctuation, and is at a stage of lower level and accelerating transformation as a whole. There is a significant spatial difference in innovation-driven development performance and speed of ascension among east, middle and west provinces.
2016, Vol. 13 
