Abstract:Based on the perspective of organizational memory theory, this paper distinguishes unintentional organizational forgetting and intentional organizational forgetting, and discusses how enterprises can avoid the loss of knowledge required for innovation through digitization and enhance their breakthrough innovation. Specifically, it constructs a theoretical framework of the relationship between enterprise digitization, two types of organizational forgetting and breakthrough innovation. Based on the panel data of 203 enterprises in Shanghai A-share from 2018 to 2020, this paper makes an empirical analysis of the proposed research hypothesis based on the structural equation model. The results show that enterprise digitization can improve the breakthrough innovation behavior of enterprises by improving the level of intentional organizational forgetting, and in the negative relationship between unintentional organizational forgetting and breakthrough innovation, enterprise digitization plays a negative regulatory role, thus indirectly promoting breakthrough innovation. After endogenous test and robustness test, the conclusion is still valid.