Regional collaborative innovation is essential for realizing the Chinese path to modernization. Based on the panel data of 276 cities in China from 2008 to 2018, this paper takes the National Smart City pilot policy as the quasi-natural experiment to explore the collaborative innovation effect and its mechanism of smart city construction. The results show that smart city pilot policies significantly promote regional collaborative innovation. The implementation of this policy increases the number of regional cooperative patents (per 10,000 people) in the pilot cities by about 0.479. Improving local innovation capabilities and developing high-tech industries are two important mechanisms for smart city construction to promote regional collaborative innovation. Further analysis reveals that the construction of smart cities has a greater impact on cities with good location conditions, and this impact is also related to the size of the city. This paper provides an essential reference for further promoting smart city pilot policies across the country and provides a new idea for accelerating regional collaborative innovation.

区域协同创新是实现中国式现代化的重要支撑。本文基于中国2008-2018年276个城市的面板数据,以国家智慧城市试点政策为准自然实验,考察了智慧城市的协同创新效应及其影响机制。研究发现,智慧城市试点政策显著促进了城市间的协同创新,具体而言,智慧城市试点政策使试点城市的城市间专利合作数 (每万人)提高约0.479个。本地创新能力提升和高新技术产业发展是智慧城市促进区域协同创新的两个重要机制。进一步分析发现,智慧城市试点政策对区位条件好的城市影响更大,同时,这一影响也与城市规模的大小有关。本文为智慧城市试点政策在全国范围内进一步推广提供了重要参考,并为强化区域协同创新提供了新的思路。