Intelligentization-oriented development is a fast-developing trend of technological revolution. It promotes the reconstruction of the industrial system of a region and affects its overall industrial competitiveness. We collected data of 28 provinces and cities in China from 2003 to 2017 to test the influence of industrial intelligentization level on the industrial competitiveness of a region.

Compared with the existing literature, the innovation of this study lies in three aspects: (1) We focuse on China, a developing country with the fastest development of intelligent technology in the world, to discuss the relationship between intelligentization and industrial competitiveness in developing countries. (2) The research on intelligent technology mainly focuses on the micro level, for instance the change of the internal structure of the industry, which belongs to the category of industrial economics. The research perspective of this study is macro level, taking regions as the research object, focusing on the change of industrial competitiveness between regions in the era of intelligentization, which belongs to the category of economic geography. (3) According to the actual situation of the development of intelligent technology in China, we improve and construct the index system to evaluate the level of intelligentization. At the same time, the ecological niche theory is introduced for the first time in the process of evaluating industrial competitiveness of each region.

The result reveals that: 1) In China's provincial jurisdictions, the higher the level of intelligentization is, the lower the overall level of industrial competitiveness and the lower the proportion of industry in the economic system will be. In regions where the facilities are highly intelligentialized, the production sectors tend to move to the less developed regions, and the growth effect of technological dividends is the focus. 2) Compared with the middle region and the Western region of China, the Eastern region, which is more developed with higher intelligentization level, has stronger ability in the research and development (R&D) of technologies, and the economic structure of the industry there tends to be stable, manifesting a strong growth potential.

1.The dataset was collated from publicly available data from the National Bureau of Statistics and Local Bureau of Statistics.

2.Like a large number of studies, we first constructed the“linear regression model” as a benchmark.

3.The competitiveness transfer of the industry is shown as the center of the industry changes from one region to another, so the spatial Dubin model needs to be constructed.

4.Considering that intelligent technology is the further development of Internet and information technology, and it has broken through the limit of distance, we adopted the Economic Matrix and Economic-Geographic Matrix. 

Note: detailed instructions can be explained in the paper: Whether Intelligentization Promotes Regional Industrial Competitiveness: Evidence from China. (DOI:https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0271186)