The evolutionary characteristics and innovation effects of technological knowledge polycentricity in Chinese urban agglomerations

Technological knowledge polycentricity is a measure of the degree of polycentricity present in knowledge innovation; it can be used to model the spatial structure of technological knowledge production and cooperation within urban agglomerations, and can thus be used to gauge the level of innovation and the quality of development in an urban agglomeration. Drawing on patent application and inter-city patent cooperation data for 293 cities in China in the years 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2019, we used polycentricity measures, instrumental variables, and panel threshold models in order to explore the spatiotemporal evolution characteristics, type evolution trends, and innovation output effects of technological knowledge polycentricity in 19 urban agglomerations. Our results show that: (1) The evolution of the morphological and functional polycentricity of technological knowledge differs significantly between agglomerations—whilst morphological polycentricity showed a fluctuating trend (whereby a decline was followed by an increase and then a further decrease); in fact, we found functional polycentricity to have gradually increased over the study period. (2) Urban agglomerations with high morphological and functional polycentricity values were found to maintain higher innovation levels, while low morphological and functional polycentricity could be linked to lower innovation levels; the results of the type of distribution analysis, further, show that while morphological polycentricity did not present any obvious concentration or evolution trends over the study period, functional polycentricity increased significantly. (3) The modeling results show that the relation between the morphological polycentricity of urban agglomerations and urban innovation outputs has an inverted U-shaped relationship, with an inflection point at the value 0.438; functional polycentricity, in contrast, was found to maintain a consistently positive relationship with innovation outputs, confirming the importance of intercity innovation cooperation when it comes to urban innovation output. Our conclusions on the development pattern of technological knowledge polycentricity can provide theoretical support for the formulation of innovation development strategies in urban agglomerations. © 2023 Science Press. All rights reserved.