Abstract: Giving full play to the role of innovation consortia in tackling key and core technologies is an important pillar for advancing the development of new-quality productive forces. Using innovation consortia in the oil and gas industry as cases, this paper analyzes how they enhance momentum and enable the development of new-quality productive forces. New-quality productive forces are inherently green productive forces, and the oil and gas industry’s pursuit of “newness” and “greenness” reflects both the technological-innovation-driven and green, low-carbon characteristics of new-quality productive forces. Based on multiple case studies of innovation consortia in the oil and gas industry, this paper depicts the institutionalization process of such consortia and argues that, by relying on institutionalized innovation consortia, enterprises can achieve a virtuous cycle in which “capabilities rise with momentum, and momentum is aggregated by capabilities.” The bidirectional enhancement of “momentum” and “capability” creates conditions for exploring new forms of productive forces. The mechanisms for enhancing momentum include embedding in alliances to leverage external momentum, organizational resilience to counter adverse trends, and ecosystem co-creation to generate momentum; the enabling mechanisms include cross-domain deployment and collaboration, cyber-physical twin co-evolution, and flexible orchestration of production factors made possible by innovation consortia. Integrating organizational momentum (shi) theory (“momentum”) with dynamic capabilities theory (“capabilities”), this paper proposes a coupled momentum-capability mechanism model and, based on longitudinal case analysis, portrays a spiraling upward path of mutual reinforcement between momentum and capability, thereby deepening management theory’s understanding of organizational momentum in the Chinese context. The findings provide theoretical insights and practical references for helping Chinese enterprises build upgraded versions of innovation consortia and foster new-quality productive forces.

Key words: new-quality productive forces, innovation consortia, green innovation, low-carbon, organizational momentum, enabling effect