What Drives Collaborative Innovation in Green Infrastructure?

In recent decades, with the urgent need to move toward more low-carbon and sustainable development, green infrastructure (GI) has gained increased attention. Due to the complexity and uniqueness of GI, and involvement of numerous organizations, it is imperative to address it via inter-organization collaborative innovation effectively. However, few studies have explored the dynamic evolution of collaborative innovation in GI and how proximity mechanisms drive collaborative innovation (CI). To explore CI in GI, this study is based on 610 patents in the field of GI in China from 2010 to 2024 and uses social network analysis (SNA) to construct CI networks, applying the Exponential Random Graph Model (ERGM) to explore the driving factors of CI in GI, with a specific focus on the driving effect of multidimensional proximity on CI. The results show that the network density decreases from 0.153 to 0.033, and the average path length remains below 3.4, presenting typical small-world characteristics. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that multidimensional proximity drives the evolution of CI in GI. Among them, the positive driving effect of social proximity is the most significant, while the coefficient of geographical proximity decreased from 2.83 in the budding stage to 0.003 in the mature stage. Similarly, the coefficient of technical proximity decreased from 2.528 to 1.735, indicating that its driving effect gradually weakened. These results contribute to the theory implications regarding dynamic perspectives for complex CI relationships in GI, and provide useful guidance for effectively allocating resources and talent training.