Abstract: In order to prompt the construction of an innovative country, many scholars have paid attention to the issue of how to promote cooperative innovation and further improve innovation quality. From the perspective of informal institutions, we investigate the influence of managerial alumni network on cooperative innovation willingness. The results show that managerial alumni network significantly improves corporate cooperative innovation. Moreover, managerial alumni network mainly promotes the joint patent application of different provinces. We also find that the positive effect is mainly in the areas with low social trust. Managerial alumni network can promote corporate cooperative innovation by alleviating information asymmetry and enhancing mutual trust. Further analysis shows that formal institutions, including intellectual property protection, legalization, and marketization are complementary to managerial alumni networks in the process of promoting corporate cooperative innovation. Our research also has several contributions. Firstly, this study enriches the understanding of how the informal institution governance of managerial alumni networks affects corporate cooperative innovation. Secondly, the result helps to clarify the influence of the interaction between formal institutional governance and informal institutional governance of managerial alumni networks on corporate cooperative innovation behavior. Thirdly, it can provide some rationales for the government to strengthen the construction of social integrity, enrich the information channels of cooperative innovation, and improve the level of legalization and marketization to establish a good institutional environment for corporate cooperative innovation.

Key words: managerial alumni network, corporate cooperative innovation, intellectual property protection, legalization, marketization