Abstract: Under the construction of an open innovation ecosystem, the government must encourage enterprises to involve in basic research on the one hand and open up more of their scientific research results on the other, so as to amplify the social benefits of knowledge spillovers. Leading technology companies must not only involve in basic research to seize the forefront of future science and technology, but also carry out market-oriented development to maintain business operations. Given that enterprises can involve in basic research in two models: directly on their own or on a consignment basis with universities or scientific research institutions as the consignee, this paper uses the principal-agent theory to build a principal-agent model respectively between government and enterprise, between enterprise and academia and between government and enterprise/academia. Then this paper explores how to design an optimized incentive mechanism through government tax incentives, capital investment and property rights coordination, compares the incentive mechanism and efficiency under different models, and makes a numerical simulation analysis by use of Matlab R2020a. The research shows that: 1) the same government incentive mechanism has different incentive effects on enterprises’ involvement in basic research, depending on their input model; 2) the government should provide differentiated fixed funding support and differentiated degree of openness of property rights for enterprises according to the model of their input into basic research, and especially for the enterprises that adopt the consignment model, the government should guide them to provide property right incentives to the universities or scientific research institutions that achieve innovations; 3) companies with low profit margins can input a high level of effort and resources in basic research, and companies with high profit margins should adopt the consignment model for scientific research under the policy of a high proportion of corporate property rights; 4) the social reputation value brought by the scale of corporate input into basic research has a boosting effect on the scale of input in different models and the level of basic research effort. The longer time it takes to gain return, the less likely to successfully build an open innovation ecosystem and put the consignment model into practice. Finally, in combination with China’s current situation, relevant countermeasures for improving the basic research input incentive mechanism and relevant suggestions for corporate strategies of input into basic research are put forward.

Key words: open innovation ecosystem, corporate input into basic research, principal-agent, incentive mechanism, numerical analysis