Evolutionary networks of interurban technological collaboration across Chinese city-regions

ABSTRACT Urban agglomeration has the function of being an incubator for innovation. Previous studies have only focused on the output of innovation, ignoring the knowledge cooperation and exchange between cities, which is an important embodiment of the incubation. Compared with scientific cooperation, technical cooperation is more experimental and application oriented, requires more face-to-face communication, and is more sensitive to distance. In this paper co-patent data were selected to show the development and differences of intercity technological cooperation networks within Chinese urban agglomerations. The results show that the technical cooperation network within Chinese urban regions has generally developed rapidly in the past decade, especially those in eastern China, which have become the closest urban regions in China’s technical cooperation.