The Path to Collaborative Innovation: Pilot driven, Patent Cooperation, and Urban Innovation Quality

Globalization and scientific and technological progress determine that high-quality innovative achievements are increasingly completed by scientific research teams with complex background. The trend of fractional authorship is vast. Based on the quasi-natural experiment of the National Innovative City Pilot Policy, this paper constructs a DID model, and analyzes the quality catch-up effect of the pilot policy on urban innovation from the perspective of the patent fractional authorship mechanism inside and outside the city. The results show that: in the short term, the national innovative city pilot policy has significantly stimulated the growth of innovation quality rather than quantity in Chinese cities. Cities with low market, cultural segmentation and large city scale are more likely to benefit from the pilot policy, and the innovation pilot policy also has the adjacency effect. A large part of the source of urban innovation quality growth is attributed to the transformation of patent production mode from enterprise independence to enterprise cooperation innovation. Moreover, the improvement in the quality of innovation due to collaborative R&D among firms within the city accounted for a higher proportion of the total effect of the pilot policy than collaborative patenting among firms outside the city. This paper points out that the pilot policy mainly brings about the quality growth of strength rather than the growth of innovation quantity, which provides an important identification path for how to balance the innovation efficiency under the background of the new scientific and technological revolution. That is to promote the quality of urban innovation through implementing pilot policies and promoting efficient cooperation among urban innovation subjects, which will ultimately benefit a country.