This paper analyzes the intrinsic relationship between urban innovation capability and inter-city collaborative innovation, utilizing panel data for 76 cities within China’s Yangtze River Economic Belt covering the period 2005–2021. The results indicate that as a city’s innovation capability strengthens, the level of collaborative innovation among them significantly increases. This positive effect operates through promoting the flow of innovative elements, enhancing knowledge spillovers, and fostering technological complementarity. Further analysis reveals that high-speed rail connectivity, supportive government innovation policies, and higher city administrative levels significantly reinforce this positive relationship. While enterprises currently dominate inter-city collaboration, significant potential remains for collaborations involving enterprises and governments, research institutions, and universities. Furthermore, our analysis confirms that innovation capability has a positive spatial spillover effect on inter-city collaborative innovation. Heterogeneity analyses reveal that enhancing urban innovation capability selectively promotes substantive collaborative innovation while inhibiting non-substantive forms, and this positive promoting effect is particularly pronounced within technology-intensive industries. This research offers new perspectives on the capability-collaboration linkage within a major economic region, providing empirically grounded support for implementing innovation-driven development strategies.
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