Business Data Analytics for Urban Green Innovation: Identifying Multi-Condition Pathways with NCA and fsQCA
Main article
Abstract
Urban green technological innovation (GTI) is widely recognized as a strategic outcome that supports the simultaneous pursuit of decarbonization and high-quality economic growth. Existing empirical work has dissected the marginal effects of individual drivers — environmental regulation, green finance, FinTech, human capital, urbanization — but has rarely treated GTI as the joint product of several interacting conditions. This paper applies a configurational business-data-analytics design to the urban GTI problem. Drawing on panel-style observations from 283 prefecture-level cities matched with a two-year outcome lag, we combine Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) with fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) under a unified Technology-Finance-Government-Talent-Structure framework comprising seven antecedents and one outcome. The NCA shows that no single antecedent acts as a strict prerequisite, but FinTech, economic development, and urbanization display medium-to-strong necessity bottlenecks that rise sharply at the mid-to-high GTI range. The fsQCA returns two equifinal sufficient configurations for high GTI — a Technology-Structure dual-driven pattern and a broader Technology-Finance-Talent-Structure synergistic pattern — both of which contain FinTech and economic development as core conditions. The configurations producing non-high GTI are markedly more heterogeneous, falling into four archetypes: regional-foundation deficit, compounded multi-factor deficit, industrial-structure–FinTech mismatch, and environmental-regulation–FinTech mismatch. The asymmetry between the success and failure pathways supports a configurational, rather than linear, view of urban green innovation. We discuss implications for business data analytics curricula, for cross-functional policy design, and for emerging-economy city governments that need to combine industrial modernization with credible decarbonization commitments.
