As essential carriers for China to capture the development strategic opportunity amid the unprecedented changes in a century, emerging industries of strategic importance are facing the challenges of “bottleneck” in terms of key technologies and low innovation efficiency. Unlike mature traditional industries featured gradual innovation, immature emerging industries of strategic importance innovate in a breakthrough way, where the new knowledge is characterized by high cost and high risk. Moreover, breakthrough innovation is not only about meeting the demands that have been recognized, but also finding potential demands that consumers have not been previously recognized. Previous research more focused on the impact of external knowledge heterogeneity, knowledge diversification, network structure, and knowledge coupling on the breakthrough innovation, yet few research the internal mechanism of the impact of knowledge base and symbiotic interface of emerging industries of strategic importance on the breakthrough innovation. Therefore, the problem “what are the internal mechanisms and dynamic processes of which the knowledge base and symbiotic interface of emerging industries of strategic importance influence the breakthrough innovation?” has not yet given a clear answer in theory. In response to the limitations of the above theory and the confine of practice, this paper studies the internal mechanism and dynamic process of the knowledge base and symbiotic interface impacting on the breakthrough innovation from the perspective of the knowledge coupling in innovation ecosystem, in order to solve the innovation dilemma facing the emerging industries of strategic importance. This paper gives systematic answer to the above questions, and it is of significant practical value and theoretical significance. Meanwhile, the paper selects the intelligent vehicle chip industry as the research object, considering the industry has a complicated knowledge base, complex symbiotic interfaces, and a relatively complete industrial evolution process across disciplines, industries, and fields. First, a total of 25 parent triangle intelligent vehicle chip industries in the Yangtze River Delta region are interviewed on their multiple types of innovative entities; Second, based on the principle of triangulation, the first-hand data, including in-depth interviews and field research are mainly used as the main source of this paper, while supplemented and validated by secondary materials such as literature, research reports, internal information of interviewees, and public media reports. The interviewees of this paper are all partners, executives, middle managers, and relevant technical leaders who have experienced the breakthrough innovation in intelligent vehicle chips. Finally, a three-stage encoding method is applied in this paper. In the open coding stage, by virtue of Nvivo 12.0, a qualitative data analysis application, stable first-order constructs are obtained through spiral extraction of concepts. In this stage, 352 reference points, 158 initial concepts, and 29 first-order constructs are extracted. In the spindle encoding stage, the extracted reference points and first-order constructs are compared and analyzed with the original data, and the logic are sorted out to extract 12 second-order themes. In the selective encoding stage, six aggregation dimensions are excavated, in order to model the internal mechanism and dynamic process of the emerging industries of strategic importance achieving breakthrough innovations. According to the multiple case studies of emerging industries of strategic importance in intelligent vehicle chips, it is found that: 1) “Knowledge base + symbiotic interface-knowledge coupling-breakthrough innovation” is the internal mechanism of the breakthrough innovation in emerging industries of strategic importance; 2) During the three stages of industry introduction, industry growth, and industry maturity, emerging industries of strategic importance respectively correspond to the differences in internal and external resource constraints, resulting in three differentiated innovation models: “Internal-dominated knowledge coupling, external-dominated knowledge coupling, and internal and external knowledge coupling”, in order to achieve breakthrough innovation more quickly and efficiently. Theoretically, this paper enriches the studies on the internal mechanism and dynamic process of the emerging industries of strategic importance realizing breakthrough innovations from a new perspective of knowledge coupling in the industrial innovation ecosystem, which pushed the limits of existing research solely considering the knowledge base and symbiotic interface of a single enterprise, achieving more efficient breakthrough innovations; From a dynamic perspective, the paper also studies the accumulation, development, and breakthrough of achieving breakthrough innovation, that is, a knowledge coupling differentiated innovation model is proposed according to industrial stage developments, focusing on the selection of knowledge coupling innovation models for emerging industries of strategic importance under different industrial stages, resource constraints, and environmental boundaries, for the purpose of achieving the breakthrough innovation more efficiently. In terms of practice, this study is of inspiration and guiding significance for emerging industries of strategic importance to solve the problems of key technology bottlenecks and low innovation efficiency.