China is entering a critical period of deepening the ESG concept in an all-round way, emphasizing that enterprises should develop in a balanced way in various aspects, including environment, society and governance. At present, although there are many theoretical studies on the impact of ESG on enterprises, there are few specific mechanisms involving enterprise innovation. Based on the analysis of sample data of listed companies in China from 2011 to 2020, this paper finds that environmental social responsibility has a positive effect on enterprise innovation, which proves that enterprises can effectively alleviate the financial pressure of innovation activities and improve their innovation ability by improving the quality of information disclosure, actively fulfilling environmental social responsibilities and improving governance level. Path analysis shows that financing constraint, agency cost and internal control have significant partial mediating effect in the mechanism of enterprise social groups promoting enterprise innovation, that is, relaxing financing constraint, reducing agency cost and strengthening internal control are the paths for enterprise social groups to promote enterprise innovation; Heterogeneity analysis shows that compared with state-owned enterprises and non-heavily polluting enterprises, corporate social responsibility plays a more significant role in promoting enterprise innovation. Further research shows that ESG performance plays a greater marginal role in promoting enterprise innovation for enterprises whose life cycle is in growth, maturity and less market-oriented areas on the basis of existing literature research. This paper has made the following contributions to promote further research in related fields: First, it empirically tests the influence of corporate social responsibility on enterprise innovation, and fully verifies the effectiveness of the conclusion through robustness test, which provides effective support and supplement for the existing related research conclusions. Secondly, it analyzes the transmission mechanism of the influence of corporate social responsibility on enterprise innovation, and makes clear the function mode of the corresponding action path through empirical test. Thirdly, the heterogeneity of corporate social responsibility with different characteristics that affect enterprise innovation is further improved, and the differences of corporate social responsibility performance in enterprise innovation with different property rights, different industry characteristics, different life cycle stages and different market environments are discussed in detail, which enriches the content of heterogeneous research in this field, helps to optimizing the social responsibility disclosure system for enterprises with different characteristics, helping enterprises to effectively improve their innovation ability and efficiency while improving their social responsibility performance, and provides a basis for expanding and deepening the research on the support and promotion factors of social responsibility for high-quality sustainable development of enterprises. Therefore, in order to effectively promote the sustainable development of enterprises, the relevant government departments in China should give full play to the guiding role of financial institutions in ESG investment, improving the ESG rating mechanism with China characteristics, establish a differentiated supervision mechanisms, give full play to the guiding role of financial institutions in ESG investment, and constantly improve the ESG information disclosure mechanism, so as to help improve the ESG performance of enterprises and promote green, high-quality and sustainable development.