Innovation leadership is a leadership style derived from the combination of innovation and leadership, which has become a new research hotspot. On the basis of reviewing relevant research literature, the connotation of innovation leadership is defined from six perspectives of trait, behavior, process, ability, role and contingency views. The similarities and differences between innovation leadership and transformational leadership, knowledge leadership and ambidextrous leadership are compared. The measurement scales of innovation leadership are combed. This paper reviews the influence and its mechanism of innovation leadership on employees, teams and organizations. It reviews the influencing factors and the moderating effect of innovation leadership. Based on the shortage of existing research, this paper puts forward the direction of future efforts in the context of Chinese organizations: testing and developing measurement scales, exploring the influencing factors of innovation leadership, enriching the influence consequences and mechanism of innovation leadership, expanding the research on the moderating effect of innovation leadership, and introducing neuroscience methods and techniques for research.