The Security and Driving Factors of the Innovative Ecosystem: Evidence from the Yellow River Basin

Ecological protection and high-quality development of the Yellow River Basin have always been seriously restricted by its unreasonable economic structure and low level of innovation. A two-dimensional indicator system was constructed to evaluate the security of the innovative ecosystem in the Yellow River Basin and identify its driving factors. The R clustering, the method of coefficient of variation, and the entropy method were used to screen and empower the indicators, and then the Lotka–Volterra symbiotic coupling model was introduced innovatively to calculate the security index and analyze its spatio-temporal evolution. Finally, the fixed-effect regression model and Granger causality test were used to identify the driving factors. It was found that (1) The security of the innovative ecosystem in the Yellow River Basin from 2012 to 2021 showed an overall upward tendency, but it was still at a low level, and the innovative landscape community lagged behind the innovative biome for a long time; (2) The security status of the innovative ecosystem showed a differential pattern of “high in the east and south, and lower in the west and north”; (3) Innovation transformation ability, innovation consumption capacity, education, and natural ecological environment are crucial driving factors for improving the security level of an innovative ecosystem.