Regional collaborative innovation is an important initiative for implementing an innovation-driven development strategy. It's key to high-quality regional economic development. Existing literature has not examined the relationship between local government cooperation and regional collaborative innovation in terms of the dimension of city-level bilateral data, and a literature review shows that relevant existing theoretical studies on regional innovation systems have failed to pay much attention to the mechanism of action of the relationship between local government cooperation and regional collaborative innovation.
By exploring the significant role of regional collaborative innovation in China, particularly in accordance with the high-profile national strategy for innovation-driven development, this study delves into how this strategy is crucial for the economic transition from high-speed growth reliant on basic factors to high-quality growth driven by innovation. This transition is contextualized within the disparities in innovation activities across regions, which are constrained by regional endowments and developmental stages, resulting in considerable disparities in innovation levels across different areas. It further examines the flow and integration of innovative elements within regions as a primary characteristic of regional collaborative innovation. The potential benefits discussed include enhanced regional innovation performance and efficiency, optimized industrial layouts, and facilitated industrial upgrades, which collectively aim to narrow regional disparities and promote coordinated regional development.Meanwhile, the government emerges as a pivotal player in this ecosystem, providing both support through funding and policies and inadvertently creating barriers through administrative interventions that can distort market operations. Local government collaboration is highlighted as a key mechanism to enhance regional collaborative innovation by creating a conducive environment for sharing resources, technologies, and expertise across municipal boundaries.
Using the Yangtze River Delta's Economic Coordination Council as a quasi-natural experiment, the study adopts a multiple time-point difference-in-differences approach to analyze the impact of local government cooperation on regional collaborative innovation. This study uses patent data reflecting innovation activities to indicate the level of regional collaborative innovation. This involves a detailed examination of city-level bilateral patent cooperation data from 1994 to 2019, exploring the underlying mechanisms and various dimensions of how such cooperation influences regional innovation. It uses a panel data two-way fixed effects model for estimation. Subsequent robustness tests, analysis of the impact mechanism using the mediated effects model, and heterogeneity analysis are made to verify the conclusions.
Key findings indicate that local government collaboration significantly boosts regional collaborative innovation, particularly through facilitating the flow of innovative elements across administrative boundaries. The study also identifies a "U-shaped" relationship between geographical proximity and innovation collaboration, suggesting that while too close proximity may hinder innovation activities due to lock-in effects, a moderate distance coupled with collaboration tends to enhance innovation outcomes.Moreover, the research demonstrates how the impact of local government cooperation varies across cities with different innovation capacities and highlights the benefits that weaker cities derive from such collaborations. It also discusses the influence of cultural differences and geographic distances on the effectiveness of collaborative initiatives, with findings supporting the notion that cross-cultural and inter-city collaborations can greatly enhance regional innovation.
The study concludes with policy implications, emphasizing the need for strategic planning and long-term investment in innovation infrastructure to maximize the benefits of regional collaborative innovation. It suggests that government policies should focus on leveraging local strengths and fostering cooperation to overcome regional disparities and drive high-quality development. The promotion effect of local government cooperation on regional collaborative innovation is not significant in the short term, but exists in the long term, which requires local governments to have certain long-term investment thinking; for cities with weak innovation capability, the key is to improve the understanding of innovation-driven development, increase the intensity of scientific and technological inputs, create a favorable innovation environment, and create new impetus for economic development. Overall, the article provides a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics of regional collaborative innovation in China, offering valuable insights into how government policy and local government cooperation can be leveraged to foster a more integrated and innovative regional economy.