City-Level Conditions for Integrating Innovation and Industrial Chains: Constructing and Validating a Potential Intercity Technology Network in the Yangtze River Delta

As innovation activities become increasingly specialized across cities, intercity technology linkages have become increasingly important for integrating innovation and industrial chains. This study examines whether city-level conditions associated with chain integration help predict subsequent intercity technology linkages. Using 2010–2023 data for 41 cities in the Yangtze River Delta, we construct a potential intercity network using the Process-Based Integration Index (PII), a proxy for selected integration-related conditions, together with relative economic size and geographic distance, and then validate it against subsequent transfers of invention patent rights from research institutions to firms. The network was more connected on average in 2018–2023, while direct-linkage capacity and structural brokerage emerged as distinct structural roles. In fixed-holdout validation, incorporating the training-fitted PII raised the annual mean AUC from 0.8048 to 0.8334 and annual mean AP from 0.6216 to 0.6742. In rolling-origin validation, the pooled AUC rose from 0.7998 to 0.8312, the AP increased from 0.6164 to 0.6749, and the Brier score fell from 0.1938 to 0.1602. In a separate fitted-logit comparison, the composite PII specification maintained strong dyadic ranking performance with fewer modeled terms, while the unrestricted component-wise model achieved a lower Brier score. This cross-level framework supports regional network analysis, the prioritization of cross-city technology search, and the monitoring of intercity technology linkages.