Abstract
Firms’ collaborative activities have created increasing opportunities for eco-innovation in modern society. Based on unbalanced panel data from the Chinese National Innovation Survey between 2011 and 2015, this paper explored the influences of different modes of cooperation, i.e., vertical cooperation, horizontal cooperation, and mixed cooperation, on the eco-innovation of Chinese manufacturing firms. The results indicated that three types of cooperation all had positive and statistically significant effects on the firms’ eco-innovation, and mixed cooperation had promoted eco-innovation more dramatically. The extent of such impacts may vary depending on the heterogeneity of the characteristic of enterprises. We also verified that knowledge spillovers from cooperative partners have played a mediating role between cooperation and eco-innovation. Our results suggest the potential benefits of diversified collaborative activities and appropriate intellectual property protection for firms’ eco-innovation in China.
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Data Availability
The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Notes
The China National Innovation Survey covered the innovation activities nationwide in 2011 and 2015. In this paper, only the data from Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shanghai, and Guangdong has been used, mainly due to the data limitation and the representativeness of active innovation engagements in these four developed regions of China.
Six high energy-consuming industries in China include the petroleum processing; the coking and nuclear fuel processing industry, chemical raw material, and chemical product manufacturing; the manufacture of nonmetallic minerals, ferrous metal smelting, and rolling, non-ferrous metal smelting and rolling; and electricity and heating power generation and supply.
The heavy-pollution industries in China include coal fire, iron and steel, cement, electrolytic aluminum, coal, metallurgy, chemical, petrochemical, building materials, paper making, brewing, pharmaceutical, fermentation, textile, tanning, and mining industries.
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This work was supported by the National Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences [grant numbers 20BJL042].
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Sanfeng Zhang focuses on data collection, data processing, conceptualization, methodology, writing-original draft, and writing—review. Xinyue Xu focuses on the data processing, writing-original draft, writing—review and editing. Feng Wang focuses on the analysis, writing-original draft, writing—review and editing. Jian Zhang focuses on the analysis, writing—review and editing. All authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Zhang, S., Xu, X., Wang, F. et al. Does cooperation stimulate firms’ eco-innovation? Firm-level evidence from China. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 78052–78068 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-21296-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-21296-6