Stability or change? Dilemmas in innovation consortium and performance measurement

This study examines innovation consortia formed by firms listed on China’s A-share market between 2013 and 2023—a period marked by successive waves of green-technology policy and rapid industrial upgrading. We began by retrieving every exchange filing that disclosed a “strategic cooperation,” “joint R&D,” or “technology alliance” agreement, yielding 5 ,697 announcement-level observations. Consistent with prior alliance research, we excluded (i) financial-sector firms whose regulatory environment and accounting conventions differ markedly from industrial peers (Chi et al., 2009), and (ii) companies carrying ST or *ST designations at any point in the observation window to avoid bias associated with financial distress. Each remaining filing was then read in full and hand-coded for consortium start date, named partners, stated duration, renewal clauses, and any subsequent suspension or termination. Treating the focal consortium–firm dyad as the unit of analysis, we rolled a five-year window forward from the initial start date to capture the alliance’s structural evolution. Within that window, stability is proxied by the persistence of core partners and unchanged governance provisions, whereas dynamism is proxied by the cumulative number of partner entries, exits, and contractual renegotiations (Karim, 2006; Salvini et al., 2022). After deleting filings with incomplete or internally inconsistent information, the final research sample comprises 568 distinct consortia involving 1 ,403 listed firms, producing an unbalanced panel of 3 ,182 consortium-year observations.