Abstract:

With the accelerated pace of green technology innovation, green environmental protection has gradually become a new direction for venture capital institutions to invest. The Chinese government has issued many policies to guide venture capital and other social funds in providing financial support for green technology innovation. However, it has ignored the requirement of coordinated development between green technology innovation and venture capital. Most studies focus on the one-way relationship between venture capital and green technology innovation, but there are few studies on the interaction between the venture capital network and green technology innovation network. This study takes 27 cities in the Yangtze River Delta city cluster as an example, using the data of venture capital events and joint patent applications of green technology from 2005 to 2018 to construct a venture capital network and a green technology innovation network. It then extracts the network characteristic attributes of the node cities in the two networks to characterize the development level of the two networks in the node cities, constructs a coupling coordination degree model, and analyzes and evaluates the coupling coordination level of each network. The results show the following: (1) the development of the venture capital and green technology innovation networks tends to be gradually coordinated during the study period, and the green technology innovation network in cities with a high level of coordination has a significant influence on the development of the two networks. In cities with a high level of coordination, the contribution of the green technology innovation network to the coupled and coordinated development of the two networks lags behind that of the venture capital network at the beginning, gradually catching up and widening the gap. At the spatial scale, the level of coordinated development of both networks in the Yangtze River Delta city cluster gradually develops from a ">" pattern at the beginning to a clear "Z" pattern and shows a spatial pattern of gradual spread to inland cities. (2) There are differences in the influence of four proximity indicators on the coupled and coordinated development of the venture capital and green technology innovation networks: the economic proximity among node cities can significantly promote the coupled and coordinated development of both networks; the institutional and social proximity of node cities in the venture capital network can also play a certain driving role. However, this driving role is not obvious in the green technology innovation network, and even hinders the coupled and coordinated development of both networks. The geographical proximity of node cities has no significant effect on the coupled and coordinated development of the two networks, but there is a certain negative effect. This study presents a way of approaching the controversy of the different effects of multidimensional proximity on the coupled and coordinated development of the venture capital and green technology innovation networks and enriches research on the coupled and coordinated development of both networks. It also provides theoretical references for the coordinated development of urban venture capital and green technology innovation.

Key words: venture capital, green technical innovation, proximity, QAP regression analysis, coupling and coordination, Yangtze River Delta urban agglomerations