How to solve the problem of greenhouse gas emissions has become a major issue of global concerns. China's low-carbon development strategy motivates its cities to improve their levels of green innovation. In the future ten to twenty years, most of the national energy demands and greenhouse gas emissions will come from the emerging or developing cities. The energy efficiency technologies will keep providing important technical support before the full coverage of renewable energy technologies. For them, it is of great significance for the green transformation and regional coordinated development of whether and how strong demand for emission reduction can be transformed into energy efficiency technology innovation, and help them catch up with leading cities.#br#Innovation catch-up is defined as the process by which latecomer countries or regions improve their innovation capabilities relative to technology leaders. Regarding the causes of innovation catch-up, the existing studies provide the region's strategic choices and macro technical condition changes as the main reasons. These arguments are more focused on the ex-ante evaluation of innovation catch-up. However, compared with non-green innovations, green innovations have stronger technology complexity, diversity and novelty. High-quality green innovations can enlighten more mature technologies and products in the future. Existing research rarely evaluates the above-mentioned ex-post performanceof green innovation. Besides, the complexity, diversity and novelty of green innovation make its generation process deeply rooted in knowledge networks and cooperation networks, but few studies have explored the relationship between knowledge network, cooperation network and green innovation catch-up. #br#To fill the above research gaps, this paper focuses on green innovation among Chinese cities and tests the relationship among a city's knowledge network, urban cooperation network and its catch-up speed. It selects the patent citation data of fossil-energy-efficiency technologies from 2003 to 2017 and analyzes whether the structural position of a city in the knowledge network and cooperation network will affect its degree growth rate in the citation network. The study has several findings: (1) the city's knowledge diversity, knowledge degree centrality, and knowledge betweenness centrality as well as the internal degree centrality in the cooperation network all promote the city's green innovation catch-up speed, while the external degree centrality of the cooperation network does not show this effect; (2) the city's knowledge diversity and knowledge network centrality have complementary effects in promoting green innovation catch-up speed, the margin effect of knowledge diversity on catch-up speed will increase with the ascension of knowledge network centrality; (3) the complementary effects also exist between knowledge network centrality and cooperation network centrality,and stronger intra-city cooperation will better integrate the knowledge network elements and facilitate the knowledge recombination through intra-city idea exchanges and R&D cooperation.#br#Several policy suggestions are put forward accordingly. (1) The local governments should strengthen the forward-looking guidance of technology development and identify the core knowledge elements as the policy starting point.(2) They should also encourage regional scientific and technological cooperation, and promote regional agglomeration to boost the exchange of innovative ideas. (3) The “matrix-like” innovation policies to expected are activate the synergistic coupling effect between the institutional facility and advanced technology identification.#br#This paper may make contributions in the following three aspects. First, it introduces the network perspective to analyze green innovation catch-up, integrates the knowledge network, cooperation network, and citation network into a unified analysis framework, and tests the complementary effects among them. Second, it connects the ex-ante evaluation of innovation with the ex-post evaluation, where the knowledge and cooperation network that form the basis and process of patent generation belongs to the ex-ante perspective, while the location change in the citation network belongs to the ex-post assessment. Third, it focuses the research units on the city level, coordinates the theories of economic geography and innovation management, and provides policy suggestions about the development of green technology for local governments from the perspective of knowledge and technology guidance and regional innovation cooperation.#br#
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