How Do Technological Ties Emerge and Endure in the Low-Altitude Economy? From Equifinal Pathways to Dynamic Differentiation

Technological innovation in the low-altitude economy is characterized by multi-technology coupling, continuous relational adjustment, and path dependence. However, existing research rarely explains simultaneously how technological ties are formed, how existing ties persist, and why different configurational pathways generate differentiated relational advantages. Using patent data related to China’s low-altitude economy from 2016 to 2025, this study constructs a technology co-occurrence network. A separable temporal exponential random graph model (STERGM) is used to identify the general mechanisms of tie formation and persistence, fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) is employed to reveal multiple sufficient pathways for high tie formation and persistence, and exact SHAP decomposition is applied to quantify the probability advantages, mechanism sources, and period-specific changes of these pathways. The results show that: (1) the technological innovation network evolved from dispersed exploration toward systematic connectivity, with a marked structural transition in 2022–2023; (2) local closure and historical ties consistently support both formation and persistence, whereas centrality operates differently across the two processes—high centrality promotes new tie formation but does not necessarily sustain existing ties, while technological scale provides continued support for both processes; (3) no single condition is necessary for either high formation or high persistence. Formation is mainly achieved through technology-compatibility and closure-based trust pathways, whereas persistence is achieved through closure governance, historical embeddedness, and non-central specialization pathways; and (4) path-weighted SHAP results indicate that pathway advantages arise from compensation between enabling mechanisms and constraining conditions, and that their realization varies with network maturity. These findings reveal the differentiated mechanisms underlying tie formation and persistence and clarify how configurational pathways operate during the evolution of the technological innovation network in the low-altitude economy.