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Abstract The report of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China emphasizes the need to accelerate the transformation of the development pattern to a green one and the implementation of innovation-driven development strategy. This further highlights the importance of green innovation in the national strategy. Universities are an important part of China’s innovation system, and it is crucial to stimulate the vitality of green innovation at universities. Existing research has mainly focused on the positive impact of green innovation at universities on corporate performance, overlooking the dynamic response of green innovation at universities to corporate demand. Does the emission reduction demand of corporations affect green innovation at universities? What are the pathways involved? And what are the moderating factors? Based on a quasi-natural experiment on the policy of specific emission limits for atmospheric pollutants, this study utilizes internal R&D data and green patent data from universities to construct a difference-in-differences model, so as to investigate the impact of corporate emission reduction demand on university-level green innovation and analyzes the pathways and moderating factors involved. The main findings are as follows: First, the impact of corporate emission reduction demand will induce green innovation at universities. This fundamental conclusion remains unchanged even after robustness tests, including the exclusion of other policies’ interference, clustering robust standard error at different levels, changing green innovation measurement indicators, and selecting sample data. Second, industry-university integration is an important pathway through which the impact of corporate emission reduction demand induces green innovation at universities. Specifically, corporate emission reduction demand not only facilitates collaborative R&D between enterprises and universities but also promotes technology transactions between them. Third, the maturity of the technology market and the degree of government guidance are key moderating variables affecting the green innovation at universities. They can enhance the positive impact of corporate emission reduction demand on green innovation at universities. This study has two main contributions. First, it offers an innovative research perspective. Current researches tend to explore the unidirectional path from university research to industry-university integration, ultimately influencing corporate green performance, while overlooking the impact of corporate technological demand on green innovation at universities. From the perspective of the universities, this study fills this research gap by examining the impact of corporate emission reduction demand on green innovation at universities. Second, it presents innovative research content. This study explores the theoretical mechanisms through which corporate emission reduction demand affects green innovation at universities and empirically tests the two mechanisms of industry-university integration, i.e., collaborative R&D and technology transactions. Furthermore, it analyzes the moderating effects of the maturity of the technology market and the degree of government guidance, enriching the current research on industry-university integration.
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Published: 19 January 2024
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