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Amid the dual pressures of the global energy transition and green technology upgrading, corporate environmental responsibility increasingly depends on interactions among firms rather than on isolated firm-level resources. From a systems perspective, this study focuses on the inter-firm green innovation linkages within the new energy sector, where knowledge diffusion, technological learning, and governance signals are jointly shaped by network structure. Using quarterly panel data from 52 listed Chinese new energy firms from 2018Q1 to 2023Q2, we employ the Adaptive Elastic Net Generalized Method of Moments approach to reconstruct a green innovation network from the observed dynamics of the panel data, and examine how firms’ positions within the network affect their environmental responsibility. The results show that the network exhibits a clear core–periphery spillover structure. Inter-firm ties are more likely to form when firms are located in the same province and when target firms have higher green patent citation impact and more executives with environmental backgrounds. Higher network centrality is associated with better corporate environmental responsibility, especially among firms facing intense market competition, state-owned firms, and non-key environmental regulatory units. These findings suggest that green innovation networks can alleviate innovation imbalances and strengthen informal inter-firm governance mechanisms in emerging green industries.
Wu et al. (Mon,) studied this question.