The Impact Of Geographical Distance,Technological Distance On Cross-regional Technology Collaboration

Cross-regional technology collaboration plays an important role in knowledge flows and promoting regional technology capabilities. While the technology-developed regions collaborate to generate technology knowledge intensively, there are increasingly more and more the technologically less developed regions participating in technology collaborations. For those regions that are trying to catch up in technology, to collaborate with outside technologically developed regions can help to promote knowledge spillovers and improve their technology capability. China is taking more chances to be involved in international collaborations; meanwhile different regions within this country are collaborating more than ever before. The factors that are influencing the cross regional technology collaborations are emerging. Currently domestic scholars are doing research from the perspective of social network analysis, and they have not yet conducted research of collaborations between regions with different technological capabilities, from the perspective of technological capability. On the other hand, existing research about the factors correlated to collaboration performance rarely relates to distance. Therefore, it is important to discover how the geographical distance and technological distance affect the collaborations between regions with very different level of technology capability and propose related political suggestions, in order to improve the cross-regional collaborations and promote the balanced technological development all over the country.This paper takes the perspective of collaborations between regions with different technology capabilities. According to the technological innovative capability of the regions (patent activities), the author divides all the 30 provinces (except Hong Kong SAR，Macao SAR，theTaiwan region, and Tibet) into two categories:the Strong regions and Weak regions in technological innovative capability. The number of co-patents between Strong regions and Weak regions is taken as the indicator of technological collaborations. This paper takes the period of 2010 to 2014, applies the negative binomial distribution mode and conducts research on the status quo of cross-regional collaborations and the effects of geographical and technological distance on cross-regional collaborations within China, focusing on co-patents between 7 Strong regions and 23 Weak regions. It is concluded that both of geographical and technological distance play negative effect on cross-regional collaborations, meanwhile the regional factors also do matter. In addition, according to the distribution of Weak regions, this paper tests the regional difference of East, Middle, and West regions. The results show that geographical difference is significantly negative in East, Middle, and West regions, and effect in West regions is greatest, while in East regions smallest. The technological distance is significantly negative in East and Middle regions, but the significance disappears in west region, and the effect in Middle regions is greater than East regions. Finally, some policy suggestions are proposed according to the findings.