Against the backdrop of China’s evolving science and technology governance, provincial laboratories are established across the country as pivots to bridge central strategies and local implementation, and as important platforms to promote the restructuring of regional innovation systems. Currently, the research regarding the establishment, development paths, and the role of provincial laboratories in driving the restructuring of regional innovation systems are still relatively under-investigated. To address this research gap, this paper employs the Multi-level Perspective and the Regional Innovation System theory to build an integrated analytical framework. Unlike traditional approaches that view innovation systems as static, this framework particularly focuses on the dynamic interplay and interweaving among multi-level factors, namely, the Macro-level Landscape (national strategy), the Meso-level Regime (regional in- stitutional frameworks), and the Micro-level Niche (technological innovation activities). This framework aims to decode how the institutional construction of provincial laboratories can serve as a process of socio-technical transition and finally lead to the reform of regional innovation systems. To verify this framework, this paper presents a single case study of the Liaoning HH Laboratory, a representative entity situated in a traditional industrial base facing urgent transformation pressures - Liaoning Province. By utilizing triangulated data from semi-structured interviews, participant observations, and internal documents, the study conducts a deep investigation into the case laboratory’s evolution in the area of high-end equipment manufacturing and machine tools. The case analysis reveals that provincial laboratories can act as critical adapters in the regional innovation system. Specifically, the study identifies three distinct paths in the HH Laboratory’s establishment and evolution: (1) Top-down institutional translation: responding to the landscape directives of national strategies, the laboratory was empowered to build a relatively autonomous management structure, which enables the laboratory to effectively convert abstract national strategies into localized exercises, thereby overcoming the previous disconnection between central policies and local implementation. (2) Meso-level demand alignment: by anchoring itself in the regional regime, the laboratory identifies and addresses specific local industrial demand, such as some technological barriers in machine tools, thereby helping tackle the historical misalignment that hindered local university research from supporting regional industrial upgrading. (3) Bottom-up consolidation of innovation activities: focusing on the niche level, the laboratory provides pre-investment and specialized support to consolidate fragmented innovation resources, which facilitates the commercialization of technologies that individual enterprises cannot handle, thereby feeding successful innovation experiences back into the provincial institution to reshape regional policies for technological innovation. With these findings, the case study reveals that provincial laboratories, as important vehicles for exploring new R&D mechanisms at the provincial level, have undertaken multiple functions in responding to national strategies, aligning regional industry-academia needs, and enhancing the efficiency of technology transfer. In this way, the provincial laboratory has effectively transformed the past innovation institution featured with insufficient central-local coordination, weak innovation foundation, and loose organization of innovation entities into a new institution. The analysis of this study indicates that provincial laboratories are not merely local executors of national projects but have become an active hub for multi-level policy coordination. In this sense, they perform an important force for promoting the transformation of regional innovation systems by aligning vertical strategic goals with horizontal industrial needs. The operational mechanisms of provincial laboratories provided an empirical basis and theoretical insights for understanding the on-going changes in China’s science and technology governance system.