In China, building innovative provinces is an important way of implementing the innovation-driven strategy. Since its initiation in Zhejiang Province in 2006, more than 22 provinces in China have joined the efforts to build innovative provinces. The provincial governments have initiated a number of implementation measures such as strengthening the leading role of enterprises, supporting industry’s transformation and upgrading, innovating the system and mechanism, innovating teams of talents, cultivating innovative environment and promoting social development, etc. However, there has been little study about how to implement the innovation-driven strategy in Chinese context. We combine theories of policy diffusion and rational choice to build a comprehensive framework to explain why and how the provincial governments implement the strategy. We focus on six Chinese provinces from eastern, middle and western China as case studies. We use public documents and relevant data to examine how the provincial governments implement the innovation-driven strategy. We identify the general objectives, key tasks and supporting conditions, and explore the existing problems and their underlying causes in building innovative provinces. The initial findings suggest that the provinces with different resource endowments and at varying stages of economic growth share many similar objectives and key measures, and they pay less attention to the innovation of government management and institutions. This phenomenon is likely the result of a “Super Stable System” that consists of compliance mechanism, learning mechanism, inertia mechanism, competition mechanism and collusion mechanism. “Path dependency” also plays some role in this case.