The debut economic launch provides an important path for breaking through the bottleneck of consumption upgrading and activating market vitality. This paper combines the theory of innovation diffusion, uses entropy method, Jenks natural discontinuity classifi cation, Dagum Gini coeffi cient decomposition, Markov chain analysis to analyze the spatiotemporal pattern of China’s debut economy from 2005 to 2024, and explores the driving mechanism of the debut economy through geographic detectors. Research has found that the overall development level of China’s debut economy is on the rise, with the debut exhibition economy having a higher level of development than the debut store economy and debut show economy. The development level of debut enterprises innovation is higher than that of debut industry upgrading and debut market expansion. The urban development level shows characteristics of agglomeration eff ect, incremental quality improvement, diff usion to second and third tier cities, and Shanghai and Hangzhou always leading. The regional diff erences in China’s debut economy are signifi cant but have decreased, with inter regional diff erences being the main source of regional diff erences. China’s debut economy can maintain its original state stably, with cross state transitions and spatial spillover eff ects. The patent quality, brand value, and R&D effi ciency of the debut product are the main driving factors of the debut economy, and the interaction eff ect between the two driving factors is greater than that of a single factor.