Intellectual property protection and enterprise collaborative innovation

Abstract

Against the backdrop of an accelerated shift in the global innovation paradigm toward collaborative networks, this paper investigates the impact of intellectual property (IP) protection on enterprise collaborative innovation, using a sample of Chinese listed enterprises from 2009 to 2022. The findings indicate that local IP protection significantly promotes enterprise collaborative innovation, and this result remains robust across a series of robustness checks. Mechanism analysis suggests that IP protection enhances enterprise collaborative innovation by alleviating financing constraints and expanding strategic cooperation networks. Heterogeneity analysis further reveals that the positive effect of IP protection on enterprise collaborative innovation is more pronounced among enterprises without university-industry-research collaborations, non-state-owned enterprises, those operating in industries with lower environmental uncertainty, and technology-intensive enterprises. This study provides useful insights for overcoming institutional barriers to enterprise collaborative innovation and offers policy implications for constructing a differentiated governance framework.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.