A Study of Influencing Factors for Improving National AI Innovation Performance: Applying fsQCA and NCA Analysis

As a disruptive emerging technology, AI will have a profound impact on production and life and even reshape the world landscape.Therefore, major economies have elevated the development of AI to the level of a national strategy and are actively creating an environment for AI innovation.Previous studies have examined AI innovation regarding its integration with business and management or international competition.They have adopted a limited focus only on specific application levels and have overlooked the holistic and comprehensive perspective to explore and understand AI innovation.This study fills this gap by adopting configuration perspective to comprehensively analyze national AI innovations, focusing on the coupling effects of antecedent condition interdependencies.This paper empirically analyzes 39 country cases using the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) methodology, constructs an AI innovation system that includes five antecedent conditions: human capital, infrastructure, government strategy, social support, and commercial environment, and explores what configuration of antecedent conditions can produce high national AI innovation performance.It is also combined with a new Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) method to test whether there is a single necessary condition and the degree of necessity.The results show that: (1) The commercial environment was found to be a necessary condition for high AI innovation performance through the NCA approach;(2) Three configurations leading to high AI innovation performance and four configurations leading to non-high AI innovation performance were identified through the fsQCA approach.This study chooses a new perspective to reveal the multiple causal concurrent mechanisms of national AI innovation.We unlock the pathways and different configurations that lead to high national AI innovation performance and provide a finer-grained quantitative analysis of the necessary conditions.Our work provides new empirical evidence and managerial insights for understanding national AI innovation, which has yet been done in previous research.