Abstract: The new infrastructure is a new generation of digital infrastructure for the digital economy, represented by 5G, big data centers, and industrial Internet. In recent years, with the continuous expansion of the scale of China’s new infrastructure construction, whether and how enterprises can participate in new infrastructure to boost innovation has been highly concerned. This paper explains the impact of enterprises’ participation in new infrastructure on their innovation performance and the mechanism underlying the impact from a theoretical perspective, and empirically validates the theoretical hypothesis based on the data of enterprises in Zhongguancun National Independent Innovation Demonstration Zone from 2015 to 2018. The findings are as follows: First, enterprises’ participation in new infrastructure business can significantly improve their innovation performance; Second, optimizing the structure of labor force is the main channel to improve innovation performance, while the channel to save management costs is not robust; Third, the impact of new infrastructure on innovation performance is ownership neutral and scale heterogeneous. The larger the enterprise scale, the stronger the innovation promotion effect of participating in new infrastructure. The research conclusions of this paper provide theoretical support and empirical evidence for fully tapping the “innovation dividend” of enterprises participating in new infrastructure under the digital economy.

Key words: new infrastructure, enterprise innovation, employment structure