How to further improve innovation quality while ensuring innovation vitality is an important practical issue currently faced by China. Human capital is the core element of technological innovation, and the geographical agglomeration of human capital is of great significance for improving the quantity and quality of technological innovation.

From the perspective of the innovation and development experiences of developed economies in recent years, tech clusters with dense human capital have gradually become an important engine for regional economic growth. Compared with traditional industrial clusters, the prominent feature of tech clusters lies in that they are oriented toward the cultivation of new technologies and new industries, have favorable funding sources and an innovative environment by being around or adjacent to universities , and ultimately attract and gather a large number of personnel for local agglomeration. Existing studies mainly focus on how enterprises in tech clusters make innovation decisions under the knowledge spillover effect, while ignoring the complex individual innovation decision-making process in the environment with dense human capital.

This paper constructs a technical structure comparison algorithm to address the problem of inventor name duplication, and then uses Chinese invention patent application data to measure the innovation output at the individual inventor level and the scale of tech clusters at the city level. Subsequently, it analyzes the mechanism of how tech clusters affect inventor productivity through the two channels of knowledge spillover and performance competition, and conducts an empirical test on the impact of tech cluster scale on the quantity and quality of inventor innovation.

The findings show that: On the whole, the scale of tech clusters has a promoting effect on the quantity of innovation by local inventors, but its impact on innovation quality is not significant. The knowledge spillover effect promotes the quantity and quality of inventor innovation, while performance competition gives rise to an innovation strategy that emphasizes quantity over quality, leading to inefficient involution; small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in large-scale tech clusters can provide a better innovative environment for inventors. Both Marshallian externality and Jacobs externality play an important role in the current development of tech clusters in China, and the existence of innovation stars is the key driving force for the functioning of Jacobs externality.

This paper enriches the transmission mechanism of how human capital agglomeration affects innovation activities and makes an attempt to solve the problem of inventor name duplication. Its policy implications include supporting SMEs, creating a good innovation atmosphere, and improving the innovation evaluation system.