How Sino-Foreign Cooperation Networks Affect Innovation Performance of Chinese Enterprises? Evidence From Biomedical Industry

Under the background of openness and cooperation, China proposes a “self-reliance and self-improvement in science and technology” strategy, emphasizes self-reliance on research and development, and puts forward a new development direction for enterprise innovation. This article constructs the collaboration network and knowledge network of biomedical industry's patents and compares the impact of domestic cooperation and Sino-foreign cooperation on the innovation performance of Chinese enterprises. Compared with domestic cooperation, Sino-foreign cooperation better improves patent quality. Enterprise innovation performance is taken as the prediction target; the importance of network structure characteristics is analyzed by machine learning models and interpretable framework. Overall, knowledge network structure characteristics contribute more for prediction. The difference between domestic cooperation and Sino-foreign cooperation is reflected in knowledge technology: Chinese domestic cooperation focuses on collaborative cooperation and knowledge cooperation, and Sino-foreign cooperation is dominated by knowledge cooperation. According to the contribution of different network structure characteristics to prediction, this article provides suggestions for enterprise development and policy innovation.