The impact of industry-university-research projects on biopharmaceutical companies’ innovation performance: moderating roles of government subsidies for innovation

Innovation holds paramount importance for both nations and businesses. This article presents a panel regression model designed to assess the fixed effects of industry-university-research (IUR) cooperation projects on innovation performance. Furthermore, it examines the moderating impact of government innovation subsidies by utilizing data spanning from 2007 to 2021, encompassing 326 listed Chinese biopharmaceutical firms. Our findings reveal that industry-university-research-cooperation projects have the potential to significantly enhance innovation performance across three key metrics: input, output, and quality for firms. The presence of government innovation subsidies as a moderator is found to have a positive influence on IUR-cooperation projects and their innovative inputs. However, it can yield adverse effects on IUR-cooperation projects with respect to innovation outputs and quality. The insights presented in this paper introduce innovative recommendations for elevating corporate innovation quality and refining the policies governing IUR cooperation.