Innovation ecosystem and regional sustainability: An analysis of China provinces

Sustainability, which addresses inequality and resource scarcity, has become a central concern for scholars, entrepreneurs and policymakers. However, the interrelationships between different components of regional sustainability in the innovation ecosystem remain underexplored. Grounded in innovation ecosystem theory, this study examines antecedent conditions across two dimensions, soft power and hard power, to explore pathways for promoting high-level regional sustainability. Utilizing publicly available official data from China, we constructed a comprehensive dataset covering 30 provinces and systematically analyzed the contributions of various potential combinations of antecedent conditions to high regional sustainability using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. This study identifies four pathways to achieve high regional sustainability, with the digital economy playing a core role in all pathways. In contrast, the roles of knowledge innovation, human capital, and technological cooperation were relatively less significant. Furthermore, this study employed Necessary Condition Analysis to evaluate the necessary relationships between each antecedent condition and the outcome. The findings not only enrich the theoretical framework for regional sustainable capacity but also provide actionable insights for policymakers to facilitate the realization of regional sustainable development.