As the “carbon neutrality” strategy is implemented, green technology R&D, a core competitive strength for sustainable enterprise development, is an essential pathway for China’s transformation and green growth. Green technology, a breakthrough over traditional production technologies, involves lengthy and costly R&D processes with high risks typically beyond the reach of a single enterprise. It requires the heterogeneous functions of enterprises, universities, and research institutions to complement each other’s advantages and establish an “industry–university–research” collaborative innovation alliance for green technologies. This paper constructs differential game models for non-cooperative and cooperative green technology R&D involving a green manufacturer and a research institution. We solve and compare the profits for both parties under these scenarios, apply a time-consistent payment distribution mechanism to allocate cooperative profits, and ensure that neither party deviates from the optimal cooperative trajectory over a prolonged period, achieving Pareto improvement and enhancing social welfare.

According to the connotation of high-tech industry and its growth, the paper proposes the evaluation index system of high-tech industry growth, which includes the absorbing degree of new technology and knowledge and the influence of new technology and knowledge on the surroundings, input level of social capital, alliance system innovation and input level of learning organization construction, innovation level of network business model, expense of encouraging the talented to attempt the creative idea, resource input index of establishing the sense of alliance identity, advanced situation of main product’s technology compared with that at domestic and abroad, as well as the transformation of innovation achievement. Combined with the characteristics of evaluation index, the paper applies the composite DEA method to empirically evaluate the growth of high-tech industry in China.