Breaking down silos: civil-military integration innovation zones and defense technological innovation capabilities

China has pursued defense-civilian integration through a state-led Military-Civil Fusion strategy, within which civil-military integration innovation demonstration zones represent a spatially concentrated policy experiment. This study examines their association with military enterprise innovation using panel data on Chinese military listed companies from 2013 to 2023. The staggered panel design is bounded by the small number of designated zones and their strategic, non-random selection. Within these bounds, zone designation is associated with approximately 21.9% higher patent-based innovation output, alongside elevated R&D intensity and strengthened government support. State-owned, high technology-intensive, and larger firms exhibit substantially greater responsiveness, reflecting differences in institutional connectivity, absorptive capacity, and organizational scale. These findings suggest that spatially integrated civil-military innovation governance appears to be associated with measurable incremental value, with implications for future demonstration zone design.