Collaborating for Innovation: The Impact of Industry–University Collaboration on Firm Digital Innovation

Digital innovation can support firm competitiveness and sustainable development, yet the contribution of industry–university collaboration (IUC) remains insufficiently understood. Using 24,093 firm-year observations for Chinese listed firms from 2010 to 2022, we examine how joint patenting with academic partners is associated with subsequent digital innovation. IUC is positively associated with independently filed digital-patent output and citation-based quality, and the results remain stable across concurrent-policy controls, city-level clustering, and propensity-score-matched specifications. Additional analyses show that IUC is associated with broader patent knowledge and greater follow-on knowledge iteration. Partner breadth is related to both innovation quantity and quality, whereas repeated collaboration intensity is associated primarily with quantity in the linear specification. The results portray IUC as a hybrid governance arrangement that connects scientific knowledge with firms’ application environments, with its observed returns varying across institutional, infrastructural, financial, and managerial conditions. Given the observational design and measurement constraints, the estimates are interpreted as associations. By distinguishing innovation quantity, citation-based quality, partnership structure, and intermediate knowledge outcomes, the study provides a multidimensional account of collaborative digital innovation and identifies practical risk-management considerations for firms and institutional design priorities for policymakers.