Urban Climate Risk and Corporate Collaborative Innovation: An Inverted U‐Shaped Relationship

ABSTRACT Against the backdrop of the growing impacts of climate risk on regional economic and financial stability, enhancing climate resilience through collaborative innovation has emerged as a critical issue for enterprises and is a key focus of academic research. Drawing on resource dependence theory and the attention‐based view, this study examines the impact of urban climate risk on corporate collaborative innovation using a sample of Chinese A‐share listed companies on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges from 2009 to 2023. The findings reveal a significant inverted U‐shaped relationship between urban climate risk and corporate collaborative innovation, a conclusion that remains robust after a series of endogeneity and robustness checks. Moderation analysis indicates that in contexts where urban openness is high and corporate collaborative culture is strong, the downward slope of the inverted U‐shaped relationship between urban climate risk and corporate collaborative innovation becomes flatter. Heterogeneity analysis based on the technology–organization–environment (TOE) framework reveals that the inverted U‐shaped relationship is more pronounced among firms with lower levels of digitalization, firms with lower levels of slack resources, and firms located in cities with lower ecological resilience. By revealing this nonlinear relationship, our study provides theoretical foundations and practical insights for enterprises to optimize collaborative innovation strategies in response to physical climate shocks and for governments to design more effective climate adaptation policies.