Abstract: The government's science and technology project is an important support for firms to improve their innovation performance. From the micro perspective of firms, based on the Resource Dependence Theory and Transaction Cost Theory, this study examines the relationship between the government's science and technology project and the firm’s paten output, and identifies the conditions where firms can achieve the highest paten output through the projects. Through the statistical analysis of 1044 firms, the results show that: First, the relationship between the number of government's science and technology projects that the firms obtain and the paten output presents the inverted U trend, which means the medium number of government's science and technology projects that the firms obtain can achieve higher paten output; Secondly, the revenue of the firms prominently moderates the relationship between the government's science and technology project acquisition and the firm’s paten output, which means high revenue helps to enlarge "spillover effect" of the projects and inhibit "crowding out effect" of the projects; Thirdly, the distribution of the government's science and technology project vary with the firm size. There is the complementary effect on paten output among different size firms, which means that the large and medium-sized firms and miniature firms may have the complementarity in achieving higher paten output.