Abstract:    The report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China pointed out that innovation is the primary driving force for development and a strategic support for building a modern economic system. How to promote regional innovation in China? As a basic carrier of regional development, cities are closely related to regional economic development and even technological innovation, and even become important drivers of regional innovation. But does this indicate that current urban development can effectively promote regional innovation? Unfortunately, the answer to this question is not necessarily positive. In recent years, with the rapid advancement of urbanization, significant progress has been made in urban construction, and contradictions cannot be ignored. The construction of local government cities relies too much on the development of a "single production park economy", which has an almost instinctive impulse to the construction of infrastructure and so on, not much on how to achieve "harmonious development" between cities and industries, which will inevitably ignore the concern of industry and population development, thus falling into the misunderstanding of "separation of production and city".
   In this background, the Chinese government has gradually realized the problem of urban construction, and has thus proposed the strategic goal of "industrial-urban integration". In 2014, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council issued the National New Urbanization Plan (2014-2020), which adopted "industrial-urban integration" as China′s leading thought on the development of new urbanization. The idea is to take the city as a carrier, carry industrial space and develop industrial economy, and take industry as a guarantee to promote urban renewal and improve service facilities, so as to achieve a high-quality development model that is dependent on and promotes each other in terms of population, industry and city. It can be said that the "industrial-urban integration" policy has become an important focus of urban construction and has played an important role in promoting the healthy and sustainable development of cities. After several years of practice, it has also reached the point of time to test its innovation-driven performance. However, there is very little discussion about "industrial-urban integration" in academic circles at present, mainly focusing on the analysis of the concept of "industrial-urban integration" and index measurement. In addition, there are a few literatures that discuss the formation mechanism of "industrial-urban integration" through constructing models and empirical evidences, while few discussions on the economic (innovative) effects of "industrial-urban integration".
    Then, does the "industry-city integration" strategy have a positive macroeconomic effect? The existing literature rarely addresses this issue. Based on the perspective of innovation, this paper links "production-city integration-regional innovation" for the first time, and empirically analyzes the impact of production-city integration on regional innovation. Specifically, this paper manually collected panel data of 285 prefecture-level cities in China from 2003 to 2016, used the number of patents granted at the city level as a measure of regional innovation, and used the principle of coupling and coordination in physics to calculate the degree of integration between industries and cities. Empirical analysis found that the improvement of the integration of production and city can significantly promote the development of regional innovation. 
    Furthermore, we have explored the two parts of "driving mechanism" and "conduction mechanism". Firstly, we use the ratio of urban land "recruitment and auction" price to the negotiated transfer price to indicate the path of "pre-production and then city". The ratio of the area of land sold by auction to the area of land transferred by agreement represents the path of "first city and then production". The higher the value of this indicator, the deeper the city "first city and then production". We found that, the path of "produce first and then produce cities" is guided by industrial development, which can easily lead to the misconfiguration of industrial development and the comparative advantages of urban resources, hinder the process of industrial transformation and upgrading, which is not conducive to the improvement of regional innovation quality. In comparison, the "first city and later production" path can better attract investment and attract talents to promote urban development. Relatively speaking, this path pays more attention to the "composite functions" of the city, and more emphasis on the coordination between the development of the city and the industry, which is conducive to promoting the integration of production and city, thereby improving the level of regional innovation. Finally, this paper uses the mediation effect model to test the intermediate mechanism and found that "industry-city integration" can affect the regional innovation level from the three paths of "human-oriented", "industrial change" and "function matching". It can improve the accumulation of urban human capital, promote industrial upgrading, and improve the urban environment, thereby playing a role in increasing the level of regional innovation.
   This paper suggests that we should unswervingly promote the integration of production and city, and avoid excessive emphasis on the development of one of the "production" or "city". Government intervention should be moderately reduced, the decisive role of the market in resource allocation should be brought into full play, and the loss of production efficiency caused by the government′s over-planning of "production" and "city" should be avoided. Urban planning should fully consider its own comparative advantages. The actual industry introduction and upgrading strategy promotes the integration of production and urban development, thereby promoting the improvement of regional innovation. In addition, the idea of promoting urbanization should be changed from "introducing phoenixes and building nests" to "building nests and attracting phoenixes", and develop targeted regional innovation promotion strategies based on the characteristics of the city. From the perspective of the urbanization construction path, the mode of "building nests and attracting phoenixes" (that is, "first in the city and then in production") that optimizes the location conditions can better bring out the innovative effects of the integration of production and city. Relatively speaking, the development mode of "produce first and then the city" is more likely to cause the dislocation of industrial development and the comparative advantage of the city.

Key words: industrial-urban integration, technological innovation, urbanization path