The impact of horizontal R&D cooperation on the climbing of the industrial cluster supply chain: from the perspective of the evolutionary game theory

Supply chain upgrade is a transformation process of supply chain operation efficiency and value realisation. The upgrading of an industrial cluster supply chain is of great practical significance to the development of China's cluster enterprises. As a kind of spatial economic organisation with geographical proximity and industrial relevance, supply chain network and industrial cluster create a favourable platform for enterprise cooperation. This paper studies the R&D cooperation of industrial clusters based on the perspective of the supply chain, constructs the evolutionary game model of R&D cooperation of horizontal enterprises in the cluster, and conducts numerical simulation analysis. The results show that: the impact mechanism of R&D investment, R&D cooperation risk, mutual trust level, R&D cooperation knowledge spillover, enterprise knowledge absorption capacity and R&D cooperation cost respectively to horizontal enterprise R&D cooperation in industrial cluster supply chain network. Finally, combined with the impact mechanism, it puts forward suggestions for realising the strategy and path of the supply chain climbing of China's industrial clusters.