Innovation industry-university cooperation and enterprise innovation performance in the Yangtze River Delta: Scale and effect

Industry-university cooperation network is an important aspect of the construction of the innovation community in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD). However, the current economic geography research focuses on the local scale and global scale. More omparative research on the effect of multi-scale industry-university cooperation needs to be carried out by economic geographers. Based on the IncoPat patent data from 2001-2017, this paper discusses the relationship between innovation industry-university cooperation and enterprise innovation performance from the perspective of scale and effect. Spatial pattern analysis and panel OLS analysis are the main methods used in this paper. The conclusions of this paper are as follows: (1) The spatial pattern of innovation industry-university cooperation in the Yangtze River Delta presents a star-shaped structure with provincial capital cities as the center. The dominant position of core cities in the network can help themselves to obtain innovation resources in the network. And the unbalanced distribution of university resources further consolidates the dominant position of provincial capital cities, which makes the pattern of innovation industry-university cooperation in the YRD have obvious characteristics of path dependence. (2) The impact of innovation industry-university cooperation on enterprise innovation performance in provincial and regional scales is significantly higher than that in other scales. On the one hand, the optimal scale of innovation industry-university cooperation has gradually evolved from the provincial scale to the regional scale during the integration of the YRD. On the other hand, the regional service characteristics of universities lead to the regional attribute of innovation industry-university cooperation. Therefore, the local or global scale has little explanatory power for the law of industry-university cooperation in China. It is particularly important to objectively view the role of universities in the process of spatial innovation from the regional scale. (3) There is a significant inverted "U" relationship between the average distance of innovation industry-university cooperation and enterprise innovation performance in the YRD. And the role and extreme point of innovation industry-university cooperation in engineering colleges are the largest among all types of colleges. Therefore, we need to pay attention to the differences brought about by the types of universities. This paper puts forward the following suggestions. We should speed up the construction of industry-university cooperation system focusing on regional scale. In addition, we should strengthen the construction of multi-scale coupling network of industry university cooperation in weak areas, and strive to enhance the network status of weak areas.