Abstract: The subsidy policies for China’s robotics industry are characterized by a large number and high density of introductions, yet they have fallen into an innovation predicament of“quantitative leaps but qualitative stumbles,”with key technologies being strangled at the neck. This phenomenon has triggered thinking about whether subsidies can promote enterprises to carry out substantive innovation. Based on this, taking the core parts of industrial robots manufacturers of 2010-2022 A-share listed companies as research samples, this paper explores the different effects of subsidies on the substantive innovation of enterprises from the logic chain of“which performs better: single subsidy or combined subsidies — whether subsidized enterprises have venture capital support?”The findings show that the direct subsidy has crowding-in effect on substantive innovation, while tax reduction and government procurement have“inverted U-shaped”and“U-shaped”nonlinear effects on substantive innovation, respectively, and the direct subsidy has stronger effect. The combination of subsidy tools has a better promoting effect on substantive innovation of enterprises than a single subsidy tool, but due to the existence of policy crowding effects, the two combination methods of post incentive, “tax incentives+government procurement”, have no significant promoting effect on substantive innovation and is inferior to a single subsidy tool. The complementary effects generated by venture capital participation and single subsidy tools will improve the substantive innovation situation of enterprises, but due to the existence of substitution effects, enterprises that receive combination subsidies do not perform as well as pure subsidy policies in terms of substantive innovation under venture capital participation.

Key words: industrial robot, portfolio subsidy instruments, substantive innovation, core component