With the acceleration of the global technological and industrial transformation, future industries have become a new track in international competition, and the construction and improvement of the future industry innovation ecosystems are crucial to a country’s long-term competitiveness. China has repeatedly proposed to plan ahead and actively cultivate future industries, and the Report to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China proposed to “improve the scientific and technological innovation system and form an open innovation ecosystem with global competitiveness”. Under the New System for Nationwide Resource Mobilization, the government is the architect of the future industry innovation ecosystems, and giving full play to the role of the government is an important strategic support and institutional guarantee for promoting industrial innovation relying on disruptive technologies. As a key instrument and carrier for the government, policy plays a vital role. According to the policy synergy theory, the internal friction within the system caused by policy conflicts and the offset of effectiveness will reduce the overall implementation effect, and single or partial policies are difficult to provide a complete policy blueprint for the construction of an efficiently integrated the future industry innovation ecosystems. Policy coupling and synergy help to break down barriers and restrictions and rapidly improve innovation performance. Insufficient coupling and synergy will restrict the systematic nature of policy formulation and the efficiency of implementation, and become a potential obstacle to China’s construction of a global competitive advantage in future industries, urgently requiring systematic research to provide theoretical basis and practical guidance. Therefore, the structural coupling and synergy of policies are crucial for the cultivation of a multi-dimensional future industry innovation ecosystem.

This paper aims to answer the question of how the core network affects innovation performance through what kind of policy coupling and synergy transmission path. Taking China's hydrogen energy industry as an example, this paper quantifies policies based on the research framework of “knowledge-entrepreneurship-business”, constructs a theoretical model of the policy coupling and synergy path of the multi-dimensional innovation ecosystem, uses the Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling(PLS-SEM) to construct and verify the transmission path of hydrogen energy policies from 1995 to 2023 that affect innovation performance through coupling and synergy, and uses social network analysis to study the relationships among government departments. The research finds that the coupling and synergy among policies at all levels have a positive impact on innovation performance, the coupling degree remains stable at an intermediate coordination state, and the synergy degree improves slowly with an overall poor performance; in the transmission path of “policy formulation→coupling and synergy→innovation performance”, the influence coefficients in descending order are the business-driven business-innovation coupling and synergy, the business-leading business-knowledge coupling and synergy, the knowledge-dominated knowledge-business coupling and synergy, the entrepreneurship-catalyzing entrepreneurship-business coupling and synergy, the entrepreneurship-boosting entrepreneurship-knowledge coupling and synergy, and the knowledge-supporting knowledge-entrepreneurship coupling and synergy; the policy network presents a “core-middle-edge” structure, playing the roles of leading and guiding, supporting and coordinating, and serving and supervising respectively in policy formulation. This paper provides a reference for the hierarchical structure quantification research of future industry policies, makes up for the deficiencies in the research on the transmission path of policy coupling and synergy, and contributes to government decision-making and industrial practice.