Abstract:In order to enrich the quantitative research on the inter-city industry-university-research cooperation network and more accurately identify the effective cooperation characteristics of the three major innovation entities of universities, scientific research institutions and enterprises, this paper takes the number of joint patent applications and industry-university-research cooperation applications in 296 prefecture-level cities in China from 2011 to 2020 as samples. The patent cooperation between industry, university and research can be classified into four types: "industry-research", "learn-research", "industry-study" and "industry-study-research", and the social network analysis method is used to quantitatively analyze the innovation cooperation network between industry, university and research. The results show that: in the past 10 years, the number of urban joint patent applications has increased by more than 5 times, and the trend is rising year by year, but the number of patents filed by industry-university-research cooperation is relatively low, and the growth rate is slow; Enterprises play a leading role in industry-university-research cooperation; The density and connectivity of industry-university-research innovation cooperation network are low, the cooperation intensity between most nodes is low, and the connections between nodes show a spatial distribution pattern of "sparse east and west, strong east and weak west". The network hierarchy is clear, the "core-edge" structure is obvious, and the radial spatial structure with Beijing as the core is obvious. Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, Nanjing and Xi 'an are in the central position, and they have strong control and autonomy over resources. Therefore, it is proposed to give play to the leading role of core node cities such as Beijing in neighboring cities, and at the same time, focus on cultivating the construction of western innovation center cities such as Chengdu, so as to increase the opportunities for external innovation cooperation of western fringe cities.