In recent years, innovative entrepreneurship has received widespread attention. On the one hand, despite the rapid and orderly development of domestic entrepreneurship and innovation, some entrepreneurial activities have problems of insufficient innovation and low quality. On the other hand, despite the strong growth momentum of innovative entrepreneurship in central provinces, the gap in innovative entrepreneurial activity in the northern and southern regions is still widening year by year. Therefore, what kind of environment will promote the development of innovative entrepreneurship is an important question that needs an urgent answer.
This paper uses data from 31 provinces in China as the sample and summarizes the possible configuration relationship and analysis model of innovative entrepreneurship driven by the knowledge filtering and knowledge spillover effects in the complex environment from a configuration perspective. The study shows that: First, there are three paths that drive high-innovative entrepreneurial activity: knowledge filtering and flow; knowledge filtering; knowledge filtering and stock. Second, the market environment appears in all configurations, indicating that under different environment configurations, as an important means of knowledge filtering, the market’s coupling with other elements is conducive to the transformation of knowledge into innovative entrepreneurship. Third, through configuration comparison, it discovers the substitution and complementarity relationship between environmental elements, and the asymmetric relationship between the driving mechanism of high-innovative entrepreneurial activity and non-high-innovative entrepreneurial activity.
The main contributions of this paper are that: First, it summarizes the theoretical framework of the relationship between the complex environment and innovative entrepreneurial activity, and constructs a configurational analysis foundation for qualitative comparative analysis, expanding the theoretical research on innovative entrepreneurship. Second, it uses the knowledge spillover entrepreneurship theory to explain the relationship between the complex environment and innovative entrepreneurship, breaking through the limitations of standard statistical analysis methods in explaining the impact paths of the complex environment and innovative entrepreneurship. Third, it reveals the causal complexity and asymmetry of the impact of knowledge filtering and knowledge spillover mechanisms composed of environmental elements on innovative entrepreneurial activity. The conclusions help to deepen the understanding of the causal complexity behind the phenomenon of innovative entrepreneurship, and provide suggestions for improving innovative entrepreneurial activity.