Current studies argue that through building the virtual organization breeding environment one can quickly find partners and create a virtual enterprise. The creation of the virtual organization breeding environment requires its own social capital to satisfy some social requirements, but such researches are few This paper, based on complex network theory, proposes a new method to identify the virtual organization breeding environment, which consists of four steps: first is to build the cooperation network from the history of cooperation between enterprises, then is to translate social requirements of the virtual organization breeding environment into structural characteristics, next is to establish the problem model, and final is to design the algorithm of searching for sub-networks (namely virtual organization breeding environments) in the cooperation network, which must meet specific structural characteristics. The proposed method in this paper is based on practical cooperation networks, and therefore is a good guidance to the creation of the virtual organization breeding environment.