Abstract: The wide application of big data technology in various industries has become an important driving force to promote enterprise transformation and high-quality development. From two dimensions of quantity and quality, this paper analyzes the impact of big data application on enterprise innovation, and uses the data of China's manufacturing listed companies from 2009 to 2022 for empirical test. The result shows that the application of big data has significantly improved the level and quality of enterprise innovation, and is still significant under the consideration of endogenous and a series of robustness tests. The innovation eff ect of big data application has a greater impact on small and medium-sized private enterprises and highly competitive industries. On the whole, the application of big data, on the one hand, promotes the input of enterprise innovation factors by reducing information asymmetry, on the other hand, achieves the effect of reducing costs and increasing efficiency, thus it helps to increasing quantity and improving quality of enterprise innovation. Further analysis found that the technological labor structure and the development level of the Internet are the internal and external factors that aff ect the innovation effect of big data application.The research results are a useful supplement to the research on enterprise innovation behavior and provide an important reference for the development policy of big data to serve the real economyand accelerate the formation of new quality of productive forces.