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Since the financial crisis in 2008, innovation has gradually become the orientation of global economic development and the strategic choice for China's urban development. With the transformation of the urban development mode from factor-driven and capital-driven to innovation-driven, many innovation spaces have begun to emerge in cities, which attract academic attention. A large number of studies on the relation between innovation activities and geographic space mainly focus on the phenomena at the regional level, and the city is only regarded as a target of innovation activities agglomeration. The study on the distribution of innovation space within the city is insufficient. In particular, there is a lack of studies on the spatial-temporal evolution of urban innovation space distribution. However, the study on the spatial-temporal evolution characteristics of urban innovation space distribution can provide planning countermeasures for the construction of innovative cities in China. Taking Nanjing as an empirical area, the spatial-temporal evolution of urban innovation space distribution was studied through methods such as average nearest neighbor, standard deviational ellipse, kernel density estimation, and exploratory spatial data analysis based on the data of high-tech enterprises identified from 2008 to 2019. The results showed the following: (1) the distribution of urban innovation space has significant spatial agglomeration characteristics, and the degree of agglomeration continued to rise; (2) regardless of the macro- or microperspective, the distribution of urban innovation space has shown the characteristic of diffusion at the initial, but the trend of polarization in recent years is significant; and (3) the distribution of urban innovation space exhibited diverse agglomeration modes and evolution trends in different regions, and it can be divided into three categories: grouped, banded, and scattered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]