Abstract: in the past 20 years, innovation activities have been in a dilemma in China. Firms are “unwilling” or even “afraid” to do innovation activities. In order to improve the institutional environment of innovation, Chinese government began to implement the IPR protection strategy in 2008. This paper aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the IPR protection strategy. The study found that, firstly, China's intellectual property protection strategy can stimulate innovation activities by increasing the illegal cost of knowledge infringement among firms. However, administrative protection and property rights protection environment is difficult to improve the innovation. Secondly, China's intellectual property protection strategy has not significantly improved the quality of innovation. The number of invention patents and the output rate of new products have not significantly increased. In the long run, companies may be caught in the “unwilling to innovation” circle, which in turn will hurt innovation. Thirdly, compared with non-high-tech firms, intellectual property protection strategy has greater in improving innovation investment and innovation quality of high-tech enterprises. It should be noted that the IPR protection strategy inhibits the innovation quality of non-high-tech firms, that is, non-high-tech enterprises interfere with the implementation of China's IPR protection strategy. Then, on the one hand, the Chinese government should continue to implement the IPR protection strategy, especially focusing on the implementation of judicial and disciplinary measures for IPR disputes. On the other hand, the Chinese government should pay attention to the potential impact of this strategy on non-high-tech enterprises.