Abstract: As a strategic tool to achieving high-quality economic development, innovation policy plays an important role in integrating technological innovation resources, leading the innovative allocation of production factors, and accelerating the formation of new quality productive forces. Innovation policy has a direct effect in reallocation and utilization of innovative production factors, while in the meantime cities are gathering places for innovative factors. Therefore, it is essentially important to examine the impact of innovation policy on urban total factor productivity from the perspective of formation of urban new quality productivity. Since 2008, under the strategy of Innovative Country Building Plan in China, Shenzhen was approved to be the first innovative city pilot. After that, the city government paid more attention in technological and industrial innovation as well as received huge resources investment from central government. The huge success of Shenzhen has led the central government to decide to continue diffusing this pilot policy in other cities. By the end of 2023, a total of 103 cities have become pilot cities, and have been included in the monitoring and evaluation of urban innovation capabilities by central government. However, there is little empirical literature to systematically study whether this policy can promote the growth of urban total factor productivity, its mechanism of action, and whether there are regional differences. Regarding the national innovative city pilot policy as a quasi-experiment, the paper evaluates the impact of innovative policies represented by the construction of innovative city pilot policy on the growth of urban total factor productivity. Research has found that pilot policies can promote the formation of urban new quality productive forces in with a significant increase in total factor productivity as the core. Mechanism analysis shows that an increase in the proportion of government research and design expenditure, economic agglomeration, and improvement of the business environment are important mechanisms for pilot policies to promote the development of new quality productive forces in cities. Heterogeneity analysis shows that pilot policies have a stronger promoting effect on the new quality productive forces in middle and northern cities, but it turns out that the effect on improving the total factor productive forces in western cities is not significant. This indicates that pilot policies are conducive to promoting economic convergence between the north and south, but it still has a long way to go as to boosting developing in western cities and coordinating and narrowing the development of East-Middle-West gap. This paper evaluates the impact of innovation policies on the growth rate of urban total factor productivity, and makes new knowledge contributions to the generation of new quality productive forces theory under the framework of innovation economics and high-quality development. Besides, the government expenditure effect, economic agglomeration effect, and high-tech enterprise innovation effect that promote the formation of urban new quality productivity, as well as the improvement of the business environment, are included in a common analytical framework to clarify the mechanism by which the construction of innovative cities drives the formation of urban new quality productive forces. In conclusion, this paper not only deepens the policy effect evaluation of innovative cities, but also systematically reveals the meso mechanism of innovation policies promoting the development of new quality productivity, providing empirical evidence support for the expansion of new quality productive forces theory under the framework of innovation economics and high-quality development.