Abstract: The new round of technological revolution and industrial reform determine that innovation performance depends not only on the improvement of factor allocation efficiency caused by data factor empowerment, but also on R&D decisions to a great extent. Using China's industrial panel data from 2005 to 2018, this paper estimates the effects of data element empowerment and R&D decision-making on innovation performance. The results show that with the significant improvement of data factor enhanced empowerment on the marginal productivity of traditional factors, exploratory R&D decisions motivated by the pursuit of complementary innovation resources and dedicated high-end assets can significantly improve innovation performance. The biased empowerment of data elements improves the high-end allocation efficiency of traditional elements. Aiming at absorbing the energy level of data elements, promoting the utilization R&D decision of high-end allocation of traditional elements contributes to the improvement of innovation level and has a significant positive effect on the improvement of innovation performance. The above findings have profound policy implications:to improve innovation performance, in addition to strengthening the scalability of data element empowerment, it also depends on a greater extent on unblocking the transmission channel of empowerment, improving the top-level overall planning and market mechanism design of R&D decision-making, so that R&D decision-making can play the leading and guiding role of data element empowerment.

Key words: data element enhanced (biased) empowerment, exploration (utilization) R&D decision, innovation performance, industrial total factor productivity