A self-reliant and self-improving digital technology innovation system serves as the technological foundation for constructing Digital China. However, the current development of digital innovation faces a dual challenge of insufficient independent innovation by enterprises in terms of scale and a structural gap in regional digital innovation. Can government procurement policies for digital products or services, as a distinctive institutional arrangement for transitioning between old and new driving forces, promote the coordinated development of digital innovation? This paper, based on nearly 650,000 government procurement contracts and publicly listed company patent text information, employs the text analysis and machine learning methods to identify the quantity of government digital procurement and enterprise digital innovation patents from 2015 to 2021. It empirically investigates the impact and mechanism of government digital procurement on enterprise digital technology innovation. The study reveals that government digital procurement can significantly promote enterprise digital technology innovation, primarily through enhancing managers’ inclination towards digital transformation strategies, increasing digital investment, and improving the accessibility of commercial credit. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that government digital procurement has a stronger stimulating effect on digital technology innovation for state-owned enterprises, mature and declining phase enterprises, strategic emerging industry enterprises, and enterprises in central cities. From the perspective of a unified national market, cross-regional government digital procurement can reduce the digital innovation gap and establish a unified national market. Additionally, policies that involve “simultaneously providing digital subsidies and digital procurement support” or follow the sequence of “first digital subsidies, then digital procurement” can generate a more effective incentive for digital innovation. Therefore, governments should accelerate the development of digital government and improve digital infrastructure to further activate the driving force for enterprise digital technology innovation; governments should actively coordinate cross-regional project outsourcing or collaboration to break down market segmentation and accelerate regional integration; government support policies for innovation in the digital economy should prioritize the timely coordination of policies on both the supply and demand sides to create a synergistic policy framework.