Measurement of Innovation-Driven Development Performance of Large-Scale Environmental Protection Enterprises Investing in Public–Private Partnership Projects Based on the Hybrid Method

Abstract

Innovation is an important driving force for realizing high-quality economic development, which puts forward higher requirements for environmental protection enterprises to meet the dual goals of economic development and ecological protection. In order to better evaluate the innovation-driven development performance of environmental protection enterprises, a hybrid method is applied in this paper. Based on the sample data of 20 large-scale environmental protection enterprises investing in public–private partnership (PPP) projects from 2018 to 2020, the innovation-driven development performance is measured. The results show that the innovation-driven efficiency of environmental protection enterprises for infrastructure construction is significantly different, and the improvement of pure technical efficiency of environmental protection enterprises is obviously better than scale efficiency. Furthermore, the reasons influencing the innovation efficiency are analyzed and discussed. The results suggest that more attention should be paid to the transformation of labor and capital in environmental protection enterprises, and the use of innovation-driven resources should be optimized. Future studies can apply the hybrid method to measure the innovation-driven performance of environmental protection enterprises in other countries, so as to verify the effectiveness of the hybrid method proposed in this paper and overcome the limitations of the research conclusions.