Abstract:China's economy is in a period of transition, and the weakness of innovation capability is the present situation of most enterprises. On the basis of investigation and research, through a longitudinal case study of an energy enterprise (referred to as LT) for more than ten years, this paper analyses and summarizes the path and mechanism of its innovation capability improvement , based on the idea of strategy leading innovation, innovation promoting capacity development and capacity supporting strategy. The research shows that the development of the enterprise innovation capability has gone through the path from secondary innovation to integrated innovation and then to the co-evolution of various innovation factors. At the same time, the accumulation mechanism, learning mechanism and coordination mechanism in the innovation mechanism play an important role in the improvement of innovation ability in different periods. Keywords: innovation drive; innovation capability; path; mechanism; case study