The paper summarizes the research progress on innovation, as well as the practice of innovation monitoring and evaluation. Then, the paper analyzes the connotations of the national creative ability, the innovative country and the technological power, as well as the relative position of China's innovation ability in the world. Some conclusions are drawn. It is hoped that this study will provide an evidencebased decision-making reference for the evaluation of scientific and technological powers.

The evaluation of the social impact of science achievements funded by the government can be considered as a breakthrough point in the reform of China's science and technology system. Besides, it is also an inevitable step to carry out the strategy of China's innovation-driven development. The lessons drawn from the evaluation activities in western countries can be a useful guidance. The paper focuses on three typical systems, the UK's Research Excellence Framework (REF) for assessing the excellence of researches in higher education institutions, the Standard Evaluation Protocol (SEP), which is used to assess researches conducted by Dutch universities and NWO and academy institutes, and the USA's STAR METRICS for creating a repository of data and tools, that will be useful to assess the impact of federal R&D investments. This paper analyzes the evaluation unit, the processes, and the objectives of the above three systems, as well as their differences, focusing on the indicators that define the social impact and the methods to realize the evaluation. Based on this analysis, it is concluded that the social impact evaluation should be at the core of the performance evaluation of public scientific research institutions in China. Following the experience of the UK's REF system, the national strategies, the differences between institutions and disciplines, as well as the regional divergence should be taken into account when developing the indicators of social impacts and the corresponding measurements in China. To facilitate the system operation, it is necessary to create a searchable database of scientific researches funded by national agencies.

Based on the perspective of economic security and the theory of the patent value chain, an assessment system for a set of patent risk indicators is constructed in this paper, to measure the degree of risk encountered by a country or region in patent activities. 4 key indicators of patent basic activities are identified, namely, the patent quality level, the patent transformation ability, the patent dispute risk index, and the patent trade level, and a comparative analysis is carried out among the United States, Japan, South Korea, Germany and China. In conclusion, China's patent development during the years from 2006 to 2015 is "fast but not in a high level", "big but not powerful". Compared with other patent powerful countries, China is not dominant and even in serious risks in the patent value chain of the key nodes in the competition, especially the increasing patent royalty deficit, which poses a certain degree of danger.

The evaluation of the national scientific research competitiveness is of great significance to determine the developmental direction of the national scientific research and to guide the development of universities and departments of the government. This paper uses a hybrid weighting method based on the data envelopment analysis (DEA) to measure the national scientific research competitiveness index of basic medical disciplines of OECD countries and analyses the competitiveness of different countries and their rankings. The results show that the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan and France have the highest competitiveness index among 28 OECD countries in the field of basic medical disciplines. In addition, the competitiveness of Finland, Greece, New Zealand and Portugal sees a great volatility, but the rest of the OECD countries are in a stable level. From a regional perspective, North America, Northern Europe and Western Europe have higher average scientific research competitiveness index, while Southern and Central Europe are on the low side. Therefore, OECD countries should strengthen their scientific research cooperation, learn from each other. OECD countries with low competitiveness should catch up with the countries with high competitiveness to promote a rapid development and to reach a balance in the regional science and education development.

The selection of interdisciplinary priority areas is of great significance for the government to formulate relevant development plans and resource allocation adjustments. At present, China pays not enough attention to the selection of interdisciplinary priority area. This paper analyzes the selection practice of the interdisciplinary priority area in marine science in the National Research Council (NRC). With a brief introduction of the NRC working mechanism, this paper investigates the selection process of the NRC's interdisciplinary priority area and explores its implications for the selection of interdisciplinary priority areas in China.