The large and medium-size industrial enterprises were taken as the examples for empirical study.Data of the higher education's development and the large and medium-size industrial enterprises' innovation from 2002 to 2010 were collected and the partial least square (PLS) path model was employed for proving the spillover effect of higher education development on large and medium-size industrial enterprises' innovation capability.The results indicate that the development level of higher education has significant positive spillover effect on large and medium-size industrial enterprises' innovation capability.Among the factors of higher education development, universities' education input, knowledge output and scientific input rank first three in contributing to enterprises' innovation, while universities' human resource output has slightly negative influence on enterprises' innovation spillover.