Promoting the sustainable development of infrastructure projects through responsible innovation: An evolutionary game analysis

Responsible innovation in infrastructure projects can promote the sustainable development of infrastructure projects where the strategies of the stakeholders involved have a significant impact on this process. This paper constructs a tripartite evolutionary game model including the government, focal enterprises, and the public to simulate and analyze their behavioral strategies and the sensitivity to relevant influencing factors at different phases of infrastructure projects. The results demonstrate that the government acts as a leader in the initial phase, and gradually evolves into the role of guardian in the intermediate and operational phases. Lower supervision costs, heavier penalties, and public participation can promote responsible innovation by focal enterprises and responsible supervision by the government, while higher incentive subsidies will generate the focal enterprises' behavior of “defrauding subsidy.” A three-dimensional framework for responsible innovation in infrastructure projects is developed based on the research results, covering the project life cycle, stakeholders, and responsibility and benefits, which embody the coupling mechanism of infrastructure projects’ responsible innovation.