Abstract:With China’s provincial areas as a geographical observational unit, and with application of invention patents as a measure index of innovation output, relative development rate is adopted to measure the relative developmental difference between China’s provincial innovations, and the Theil index as well as its decomposition is employed to depict in details the time-space evolution characteristics of innovation difference across eastern, central, and western areas of China. The finding of the study suggests: ① During the 1988-2013 period, the regional difference in relative development rate of China’s provincial innovation was relatively huge, rendering a spatial distribution characteristic of gradient descending from east to west; ② The difference between intra-regional innovations was slowly dilated within the period of inspection, rendering a U-shape variation characteristic over two stages, and they were not characterized by “club convergence”; ③ The difference of innovation between regions diminished before enlarged and then diminished again, thus pushing the overall difference of innovation to have inflected at the years 1996 and 2007 and render a characteristic of decrease-increase-decrease S-shape variation; ④ From the perspective of changing tendency of contribution rate, the rate at which the intra-regional provincial difference contributes to the overall national difference decreases before increases within the period of inspection, while the rate at which the innovation difference across the three areas contributes to the overall national difference renders a development tendency of increment followed by decrement.