Do Digital Industry Cluster Policies Promote Enterprise Collaborative Innovation? Evidence from a Quasi-Natural Experiment in China

As an industry policy commonly adopted by governments worldwide, the digital industry cluster policy facilitates data resource accessibility. Whether this policy can also promote enterprise collaborative innovation, especially facilitating strong alliances among enterprises with high breakthrough innovation capabilities, is the key to cultivate internationally competitive advantages. To address this question, this paper takes China’s digital industry cluster policy as a quasi-natural experiment and employs the staggered difference-in-differences model to analyze the impact of digital industry clusters on enterprise collaborative innovation. This study finds that digital industry cluster policy drives an increase in the number of scientific, technological, and legal intermediaries, improves the level of judicial protection, and thus optimizes the external environment for enterprise collaborative innovation. Meanwhile, the policy promotes the deepening of enterprise division of labor, strengthens specialized agglomeration, and improves the allocation efficiency of data and labor factors, thereby stimulating the internal demand of enterprise collaborative innovation. Further analysis reveals that the policy does not facilitate strong–strong enterprise partnerships; instead, it promotes weak–weak and strong–weak enterprise partnerships. The academic contributions of this research are twofold: first, it investigates the impact of improved enterprise conditions on collaborative innovation from the perspective of enterprises’ own factor allocation capabilities; second, it examines the cooperative characteristics of enterprises with distinct breakthrough innovation capabilities, which expands the research scope of cooperative innovation characteristics.