In recent years, China’s economic development has been affected by factors such as rising labor costs and intensifying international trade frictions. China’s comparative advantage in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows has begun to weaken. In the context of China’s current innovation-driven development strategy, whether FDI can provide help for China’s technological innovation is an important issue that needs to be studied. However, there is still a lack of research in this area in the existing literature. The implementation of innovative industrial cluster pilot policies provides a unique perspective for studying this issue. The innovative industrial cluster pilot policy aims to promote the development of high-tech industrial clusters and promote technological innovation. Therefore, this article regards the implementation of the innovative industrial cluster pilot policy as a quasi-natural experiment, exploring the impact of the innovative industrial cluster pilot policy on FDI inflows, and also discussing its impact on high-quality economic development. The possible innovations of this article are: firstly, existing research mainly focuses on the provincial level, which is not conducive to a detailed analysis of the policy effects of innovative industrial cluster pilot policies. Therefore, this article uses prefecture-level city samples; secondly, this paper divides the sample into different types to study the heterogeneous impact of innovative industrial cluster pilot policies on foreign capital inflow, and to explore the mechanism of the impact of innovative industrial cluster pilot policies on foreign capital inflows. This paper used the panel data of 276 cities from 2005 to 2020 to establish a double difference model to study this. The empirical research results showed that the pilot policy of innovative industrial clusters significantly promoted FDI inflows. The mechanism test found that the implementation of innovative industrial cluster pilot policies is mainly based on optimizing the business environment and enhancing human capital to promote FDI inflows. The heterogeneity test found that the policy effect of promoting FDI inflows through innovative industrial cluster pilot policies was significant in regions with low labor costs and strong financial strength. In addition, further research was conducted to explore the positive impact of innovative industrial cluster pilot policies on high-quality economic development by attracting FDI inflows. The research found that innovative industrial cluster pilot policies can further promote industrial structure upgrading, innovation quality improvement, and total factor productivity improvement by attracting FDI inflows, indicating that innovative industrial cluster pilot policies not only help promote FDI inflows but also have a positive impact on the high-quality development of the economy by promoting FDI inflows. The research in this article to some extent reveals the inherent logic between innovation-driven development policies and FDI inflows, as well as high-quality economic development. It is helpful for government departments to formulate more targeted policies and measures to stabilize and attract foreign investment in the future, and to provide differentiated policy support for different regions to stabilize and attract foreign investment, so as to better play the role of FDI in promoting high-quality economic development in China.