Abstract:As a new model of the effective combination of the government, industry, university and research institute, the new type of research institutions co-established by universities and local governments have become an important support for the implementation of innovation-driven development strategy in the new normal of China’s economy. This paper analyzes the causes, characteristics and functions of the new type of research institutions co-established by universities and local governments, and takes China’s top nine universities as the examples to analyze their development status and characteristics. The results show that the new type of research institutions in China’s top nine universities have grown rapidly in the past decade. The nature of the new type of research institutions is mainly public institutions and their researches mainly focus on big data, Internet of things, intelligent equipment and other fields. These institutions are widely distributed, but they are mainly concentrated in Nanjing, Suzhou and other innovative cities. The cooperation type of these research institutions is "cooperation with the local governments in different places", and cooperative governments are mainly prefecture-level cities’ governments.