What Affects Durable National Innovation Performance? An Analysis in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Given the widespread impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on global innovation systems, which has generally led to a decline in national innovation performance (NIP), it is now more important than ever to identify strategies that can enhance NIP and achieve durable national innovation performance (DNIP). This study, grounded in the technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework, examines seven critical variables: human capital and research (HCR), foreign direct investment (FDI), country size (CS), innovation linkages (IL), control of corruption (CC), institutions (INS), and infrastructure (INF). It explores how these factors influence NIP and employs the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) method to uncover various pathways that impact NIP. By analyzing data from the pandemic period (2019–2021), the study identifies optimal configurations for enhancing NIP and compares them with those from the pre-pandemic era. This comparison reveals pathways to achieving DNIP. The research highlights three key findings: (1) None of the seven variables—HCR, FDI, CS, IL, CC, INS, and INF—alone are sufficient to directly influence the improvement or decline of NIP. (2) Four primary pathways to enhancing NIP have been identified: environment and human capital-driven, environment and technology co-driven, organization-driven, and organization and environment co-driven. (3) Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, IL have become increasingly critical in driving NIP. By analyzing the optimal configurations before and after the pandemic, the study concludes that the key pathways to achieving DNIP involve a combination of HCR, IL, INS, CC, and INF. These findings offer new insights into the dynamics of NIP during the pandemic and provide a foundation for designing effective policies and strategies to boost innovation performance.