Scale Meets Networks: Interactions and Multi-path Transmission Mechanisms between Urban Economic Scale and Innovation Networks in China

<title>Abstract</title> <p>Under the context of innovation driven development and highly mobile production factors, the interaction between urban economic scale and innovation networks increasingly shapes urban hierarchy restructuring and regional innovation development. Using 1,790,452 patent cooperation records among 296 Chinese cities from 2018 to 2023, this study employs a generalized structural equation model (GSEM) to examine their bidirectional interaction and mediation mechanisms. The results show that urban innovation linkages and economic scale exhibit a converging superlinear relationship. Urban economic scale and innovation networks form a positive feedback cycle, with economic scale exerting a stronger effect on networks than the reverse effect. Labor matching positively mediates the effect of economic scale on innovation networks, whereas industrial agglomeration produces a negative lock in effect and policy pathways show contextual dependence. In the reverse direction, industrial upgrading serves as an effective pathway within city categories, while local innovation transformation remains unstable and population agglomeration exhibits heterogeneous effects across scales and city types. These findings provide implications for optimizing urban innovation networks and promoting coordinated urban development.</p>