Configurational pathways to SRDI enterprise growth in China’s digital economy: a fsQCA approach

The business environment serves as a critical institutional foundation for cultivating and fostering the innovative development of specialized, refined, unique, and new (SRDI) enterprises, which are innovative small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) focusing on niche technologies and high-value specialization. However, existing research has paid insufficient attention to the mechanisms through which the business environment influences SRDI cultivation within the digital economy. Guided by configurational thinking, this study employs fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to identify how different combinations of digital and traditional environmental factors jointly drive SRDI SME development, thereby providing a theoretically coherent and methodologically rigorous examination of multiple causal pathways. The analysis reveals several effective cultivation configurations characterized by diversity and balance, including the digital comprehensive leading type, digital innovation–legal coordination type, and digital core-driven type. These results demonstrate that digital transformation functions as the central mechanism linking environmental configurations to SRDI growth, where digital elements such as finance, innovation, and e-government complement or compensate for weaknesses in traditional legal and cultural contexts. The study extends configurational theory by empirically illustrating how synergistic and non-linear interactions among environmental elements can generate multiple equifinal pathways toward enterprise upgrading. Furthermore, it constructs a binary interaction framework integrating the digital economy and traditional environment, offering a new analytical lens for understanding SME innovation and policy design. Practically, the findings suggest that regions should adopt contextspecific cultivation paths, strengthen digital ecosystem development, and promote the integration of traditional institutional advantages with digital transformation to advance differentiated industrial innovation strategies.

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