The Impacts of production linkages on cross-regional collaborative innovations: The role of inter-regional network capital✰

• Aims to investigate how cross-regional production linkages promote collaborative innovations. • Intermediate input and capital good linkages promote cross-regional collaborative innovation. • Inter-regional network capital has stronger mediation effect for regions with high similarity. • Enrich the theory of inter-regional knowledge flow and the Network-based view of regional growth. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether and how different types of cross-regional production linkages promote cross-regional collaborative innovations. Based on the econometric analysis of a Chinese patent database, we found that inter-regional production linkages indeed can facilitate inter-regional collaborative research and development (R&D). The results further indicated that 1) the linkages of intermediate inputs and capital goods can promote inter-regional collaborative innovations; 2) inter-regional network capital positively mediates the relationship between the linkages of capital goods and the inter-regional collaborative innovations; and 3) the linkage among capital goods, network capital, and collaborative innovation is stronger when the regional pairs have higher Similarity of the economic development level.