External technology commercialization (ETC) has become common practice for innovative firms recently, but the revenue dilemma between ‘Revenue Effect’ and ‘Profit Dissipation Effect’ is becoming obvious. The paper takes a contingency perspective to analyze how appropriation regime and technological market influence strategic revenue, product-oriented revenue and technology-oriented revenue. Furthermore, the hypotheses of how firms external factors affect the strategic revenue are tested in this study by survey data from 142 Chinese innovation firms by OLS regression. The results demonstrate that environmental antecedents concerning patent protection, technological turbulence, and transaction frequency have positive effects on product oriented revenue, but they have no effects on technology oriented revenue except that technological turbulence has positive effects on technology oriented revenue.