Promoting green innovation capability is of great significance to China's realization of green economic power and green innovation power. Based on the perspective of economic development, this paper establishes a comprehensive evaluation system for improving regional green innovation capability from 19 indicators in five aspects, including green innovation input, green innovation output, green development, talent development and utilization, and economic benefits, and uses the entropy weight TOPSIS method to estimate the green innovation capability of Shandong Province from 2012 to 2022. On this basis, the European distance method is used to identify the key influencing factors. The results show that the overall green innovation capability of Shandong Province is on the rise, but the speed of green innovation capability improvement is slightly lower than the speed of green innovation input; Under the average level of green innovation during the sample period, green innovation input, green innovation output, green development, and talent development and utilization have promoting effects on the improvement of green innovation ability, but the economic benefits fail to meet the requirements of promoting green innovation ability.