中文摘要：

跨国专利合作对于我国企业的技术创新具有重要意义。整合不同接近性因素来观察空间分散个体间的知识流动现象成为理论研究的新热点。既有研究分别探讨了地理接近性和社会接近性对远距离技术知识合作的影响,然而对二者的相互作用关系尚缺乏深入认识。基于112家中外企业的跨国专利合作数据,采用整体网络分析方法,研究发现地理接近性与跨国专利合作网络节点连接距离正相关,对连接重要程度无显著影响,说明地理空间并没有显著阻碍企业间的跨国专利合作。社会接近性对二者均有显著正向影响且对地理接近性与连接距离的相互关系具有中介作用,表明基于科技人员往来形成的密切社会关系有助于促进远距离技术知识合作。

英文摘要：

Proximities are important to co-patenting activities for Chinese firms with foreign partners. Integrating different proximities to investigate knowledge flows among geographical actors now becomes a newly airing research area. Prior studies have paid very little attention on the mutual interaction between geographic proximity and social proximity during the international technological collaborating processes, though the effect of both of the two types of proximities has been discussed respectively in dozens of researches. This paper, based on co-patenting data of 112 firms, explored the role that social proximity plays on the relationships of geographic proximity and international co- patenting activities by adopting the methodology of entire network analysis. This research found out that geographic proximity has insignificant effect on the extent of importance of knowledge ties but positively correlate with distance between firms in network. This result indicates that geographical proximity does not impede cross- national co- patenting activities. Social proximity has mediating effect on the relationships between geographic proximity and nodal distance in network which indicates that social closeness of researchers between Chinese firm and foreign company facilities knowledge collaboration among territorial dispersed partners.