The Third Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China adopted the Resolution on Further Deepening Reform Comprehensively to Advance Chinese Modernization, which calls for improving the institutions and mechanisms for fostering new quality productive forces in line with local conditions, and made comprehensive arrangements for the development of new productive forces. By measuring the development potential of the new productive forces, we can fully identify the crux of their development imbalance, grasp their potential driving forces and feasible directions more comprehensively and systematically, and provide a more targeted basis for policy formulation. Based on provincial panel data, this paper analyzes the development potential of new quality productive forces, and its temporal-spatial differences in different provinces of China using the entropy method, Theil index and Moran index, and puts forward the corresponding development strategy focus. The study finds that: 1) The development potential of new quality productive forces in the provinces and regions shows a fluctuating and rising development trend, but there are significant gaps between regions. 2) The spatial imbalance between provinces and regions is decreasing year by year, showing a strong regional convergence. 3) There has been an interconnectedness between provinces and regions, with high-value regions driving the development of the regions. 4) In the future, we should focus on three strategic aspects: improving the development potential of new quality productive forces in line with local conditions, accelerating the development spatial pattern driven by multi-core, and building a multi-dimensional collaborative cooperation mechanism, so as to form a joint force to improve the development potential of new quality productive forces. This study provides important reference for the strategic concept of coordinating all the activities of the nation like moves in a chess game, the formulation of differentiated development policies tailored to local conditions, and the scientific and rational optimization of regional synergy and high-quality development.