The opening of public data is an important measure to awaken dormant data and promote the value creation of data elements. Innovation is a prominent feature of new quality productive forces. Digital innovation, as a frontier field for major countries to reshape the innovation landscape, is an important part of the construction of new quality productive forces.

This paper incorporates data elements into the endogenous growth theory framework to explain the relationship between the opening of public data and enterprise innovation. It takes the successive establishment of public data opening platforms in cities as a quasi-natural experiment and uses the staggered DID method to test the impact of public data opening on enterprise digital innovation (new quality productive forces effect). The results show that the opening of public data significantly promotes enterprise digital innovation. This relationship follows a unified logic of strengthening the basic support for innovation, enhancing the willingness to innovate, and strengthening the driving force for innovation, and the effect varies depending on the scale of the enterprise, the technological and competitive characteristics of the industry, and the intensity of local digital economy policies. The overall quality of public data opening and the quality of platform construction can promote enterprise digital innovation, while the effects of data opening quality and policy guarantee intensity have not yet been highlighted.

The marginal contributions of this paper are as follows: First, it incorporates the data elements released by the opening of public data into the endogenous growth theory model, and clarifies the dynamic relationship between the opening of public data and enterprise innovation, providing a clear framework for understanding the new quality productive forces effect of public data opening. Second, it follows the chain logic of strengthening the basic support for innovation, enhancing the willingness to innovate, and strengthening the driving force for innovation, clarifying the transmission path of public data opening affecting enterprise digital innovation. Third, it expands the empirical evidence from the provincial level to the city level and enriches the evaluation dimensions of the digital innovation effect of public data opening, providing policy implications for driving digital innovation and promoting the construction of new quality productive forces.