Abstract:    Innovation consortium, representing a micro-level achievement of the new national system, has become a crucial way for China to respond to scientific and technological innovations, promote the integrated innovation and support high-quality industrial development. This paper, based on the multi-agent participation model of innovation consortium, after considering the strategic choices of leading enterprises, supporting enterprises, and government supervision departments, constructed a tripartite evolutionary game model, and solved the stable equilibrium point of each game player′s strategic choice. The stability of the strategy combination was analyzed with the Lyapunov′s first method, and Matlab 2022b was used for simulation analysis to verify the influence of each decision variable on the strategy choice of different players. The results showed that: first of all, the leading enterprises in the industrial chain are the key driving forces affecting the formation of innovation consortium. For the leading enterprises, the incurred loss and cost of collaborative innovation when they do not lead innovation in the innovation consortium are the key factors influencing the evolutionary game results. Secondly, the supporting enterprises in the industrial chain, as the systemic innovation subjects of innovation consortium, are more sensitive to government subsidies than the leading enterprises. With the higher probability of local government subsidies and the leading enterprises of leading innovation, they are more inclined to join the cooperation of innovation consortium. Moreover, the support of local government is the basic guiding force for the formation of innovation consortia in the early stage, and the central government′s funding preference for local governments will have a positive impact on the evolution stable strategy of local governments. Finally, this paper proposed the following countermeasures: refined policies should be provided to enhance the leading innovation capabilities of the industrial chain leading enterprises; targeted subsidy should be implemented to stimulate the endogenous innovation drive of the industrial chain supporting enterprises; and integrated cooperation platforms should be established to bolster the innovation vitality of the industrial chain. Key participating entities of the innovation consortium and their corresponding functional orientations, as well as the evolutionary process of their strategic choices should be taken as the main research line to enrich the theoretical research on the formation of innovation consortia. Moreover, focuses systematically on the strategies of micro-entities in the innovation consortium will offer more practical insights into the maintenance of stability.

Key words: innovation consortium, stable strategy, leading enterprise, three-party evolutionary game, simulation analysis