Abstract:     High-tech industry agglomeration is the key support for the regions to break through the development bottleneck and establish the growth track of innovation, as well as the inner dynamics to empower regional innovation. Based on the perspective of innovation value chain, this paper took 30 provincial-level regions in China as the research samples, and applied the fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) method to test. We focused on exploring the multiple paths of specialized agglomeration and diversity agglomeration of high-tech industries to improve the performance of knowledge production, technology development and innovation commercialization under the coordination of regional innovation foundation and innovation environment. Furthermore, we deeply discussed the difference and location heterogeneity of these paths. The results found that: (1) The paths driving the improvement of knowledge production performance and technology development performance include the high-tech industry diversity agglomeration-led type, the factor-pulling and environment-supported type and the comprehensively-driven type. (2) The improvement path of regional innovation commercialization performance can be identified as the high-tech industry specialization agglomeration-led type, the specialized agglomeration-innovation founded and environment-supported type, the factor-pulling and environment-supported type and the government-guided and R&D personnel compensated type. (3) Differences in three stages of regional innovation paths lie in the different types of high-tech industry agglomeration and the core role of R&D personnel. (4) The paths of innovation performance improvement at three stages in the eastern areas and the central and western regions showed different characteristics, which are reflected in the differentiated incentive effects of the dominant elements. The findings will help to open the black box of the influence mechanism of high-tech industry agglomeration on the regional innovation process, and provide practical insights for regions to seek for suitable innovation paths.

Key words: specialized agglomeration of high-tech industries, diversified agglomeration of high-tech industries, three-staged innovation performance of regions, configuration analysis