The role of former collaborations in strengthening interorganizational links: evidence from the evolution of the Chinese innovation network

Interorganizational collaboration is considered to be crucial in improving organizations’ innovation and economic performance. Interorganizational collaborations form interorganizational innovation networks. Despite scholars’ efforts to uncover the dynamics of innovation networks, we lack an understanding of how and why new links emerge between organizations, thus promoting the evolution of the innovation network. In this paper, we increase the understanding of how former direct and indirect collaborations help to increase link strength in innovation networks and how this is a dynamic phenomenon. We integrate trust theory with the network perspective and analyze patent data to track the evolution of China’s innovation network. We investigate former direct and indirect collaborations’ roles in improving link strength and how the roles change as the network evolves through different stages and becomes more complex. Our results show that China’s innovation network evolves through three stages from 1990 to 2016. Organizations tend to link themselves to those occupying central positions in the network since central organizations demonstrate higher resource accessing ability and visibility. Both former direct and indirect collaborations increase link strength, but the role of former indirect collaborations is weaker compared with that of former direct collaborations. In addition, both positive effects on enhancing link strength vary in the early expansion and explosion stages of the Chinese innovation network. Moreover, a network with a complex structure is not favorable for collaboration strength and weakens former direct and indirect collaborations’ positive roles in increasing link strength. This paper contributes to the literature stream of interorganizational collaboration strength by uncovering the dynamic roles that former direct and indirect collaborations play in enhancing collaboration strength in the context of Chinese innovation network.