Firms’ Structural Positions in Patent Citation Networks and Innovation Performance: Evidence from a Large-Scale Chinese Dataset

Using a panel of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2007 to 2022, this study examines how firms’ structural positions in patent citation networks affect innovation efficiency. We construct a firm-level patent citation network and use betweenness centrality to capture firms’ brokerage-oriented positions in knowledge flows. Based on firm- and year-fixed-effects models, instrumental-variable estimation, and robustness checks, we find that stronger brokerage positions significantly improve innovation efficiency. Mechanism analyses show that this effect operates through two channels: cross-domain knowledge recombination and organizational boundary spanning. Firms in stronger brokerage positions are more likely to access technologically heterogeneous external knowledge and interact with a wider range of external knowledge-bearing entities, thereby improving the efficiency with which innovation inputs are transformed into patent-based outputs. We further find that digital transformation negatively moderates the relationship between brokerage centrality and innovation efficiency. This suggests that digital transformation reduces firms’ marginal dependence on external brokerage positions by strengthening internal data-processing, coordination, and knowledge-integration capabilities. Additional analyses show that the positive effect of brokerage centrality is broadly shared across ownership groups. Regional heterogeneity is more evident in the stronger brokerage premium observed in the western region than in the eastern region.