In the context of “high-quality development”, enterprise begins to respond more to the “meaning” of social demand, national strategy, and human development. However, existing research has not sufficiently addressed the critical issue of how enterprises can achieve high innovation performance while responding to these demands, resulting in mounting tensions between societal needs and corporate interests and posing challenges to innovation strategies aimed at enhancing overall welfare. This study adopts a perspective integrating innovation meaning and knowledge management to explore how the coupling configurations of multi-dimensional innovation meaning and knowledge management capability influence enterprises' high innovation performance. Based on case data from 103 innovative enterprises and using the fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) method, the study finds that the coupling configuration of "meaning" and "capability" in the innovation process enables enterprises to achieve high innovation performance while pursuing positive externalities. Furthermore, an analysis of scale differences reveals that, beyond the primary path of “meaning-capability” coupling, an auxiliary path exists under specific conditions where enterprise capability dominates. This finding highlights the theoretical boundaries of the study from a resource-constraint perspective, showing that for small enterprises with limited scale and resources, there is an alternative auxiliary path to achieving high performance through capability building alone, apart from the primary path driven by positive externalities. From the perspective of the coupling configurations of “meaning and capability”, this paper systematically explores and answers the key question of “whether pursuing ‘meaning’ can improve enterprises’ innovation performance”, which is of great value to the development of both meaningful innovation theory and innovation practice in the new era.