The Enterprise-Led Innovation Cooperation Network’s Evolution Mechanism and Its Impact on Sustainable Development

Enterprise-led innovation cooperation significantly accelerates scientific and technological progress, enhances corporate competitiveness, and promotes global technological development through resource integration, cross-field integration, and risk sharing. Investigating the modes and evolutionary mechanisms of enterprise-led innovation cooperation is of important practical significance. This paper proposes a method for constructing an enterprise-led innovation team collaboration network. Based on the data of the Jiangsu Provincial Science and Technology Progress Award from 2006 to 2023, an enterprise-led innovation team collaboration network is established. Low-order and high-order network topological indicators are adopted to analyze the topological characteristics of the collaboration network in different period stages. From the dual perspectives of spatial layout and organizational structure, this paper further explores the characteristics and evolutionary process of innovation entities within the collaboration network. The results reveal that all low-order topological indicators of the innovation collaboration network show an upward trend, and the cooperative relationships among innovation entities become increasingly close. However, enterprises still lack sufficient potential and motivation in driving innovation collaboration. The proportion of non-zero high-order indicators is relatively low, indicating that innovation entities mainly engage in direct cooperation while the proportion of indirect collaborative innovation remains at a low level. Spatially, the innovation collaboration network presents a diffusion trend of innovation entities from intra-provincial cooperation to cross-provincial cooperation, forming multiple innovation clusters centered on core cities. Furthermore, with the calculated network topological indicators, a multiple regression model is constructed to explore the relationship between the enterprise-led innovation collaboration network and sustainable development. The empirical results demonstrate that the average path length of the innovation collaboration network exerts a significant negative impact on regional sustainable development, while the number of network edges has a significant positive impact.