The digital economy serves as a crucial engine for the formation of new quality productive forces, while digital entrepreneurship is a key link in achieving digital industrialization and industrial digitization. The theory of entrepreneurial knowledge spillovers points out that knowledge spillovers from incumbent firms are an important source of entrepreneurship, and the sources of digital entrepreneurship are undoubtedly broader considering the high correlation between the digital economy and other economic sectors. However, the literature rarely considers the influencing factors of digital entrepreneurship from a cross-industry perspective, and in particular lacks in-depth research on how to utilize the advantages of existing non-digital technological innovations to promote digital entrepreneurship. This paper adopts registration information data of national industrial and commercial enterprises, China patent data in CnOpenData, etc., and draws on the studies of Ye W, et al.(2019), Zhu X. and Hu C. (2021), which measured the digital entrepreneurship activity and the level of non-digital technological innovation of 284 cities from 2009 to 2018, respectively, and theoretically analyzed and empirically examined the impact of non-digital technological innovation on digital entrepreneurship. The findings show that non-digital technological innovation can significantly enhance the digital entrepreneurship activity of cities, and the conclusion still holds after considering the impact of endogeneity problems and robustness tests; by industry, non-digital technological innovation mainly promotes digital service entrepreneurship; the promotion effect of non-digital technological innovation on digital entrepreneurship in northern cities, coastal cities, and cities with high levels of digital governance, and in 2014 and later is more significant. Mechanism analysis shows that inter-industry knowledge spillover effect, digital human capital effect, and digital demand linkage effect are important channels through which non-digital technological innovation affects digital entrepreneurship, among which the contribution of inter-industry knowledge spillover effect is relatively larger. Compared with the existing literature, the marginal contribution of this paper is reflected in the following three aspects: first, it reveals and tests the role mechanism of non-digital technological innovation affecting digital entrepreneurship, such as inter-industry knowledge spillover effect, digital human capital effect, and digital demand linkage effect, and expands the research on the influencing factors of digital entrepreneurship; second, it utilizes the data of registration information data of national industrial and commercial enterprises to effectively measure the activity degree of digital entrepreneurship activity and empirically tests the impact of non-digital technological innovation on digital entrepreneurship and digital entrepreneurship in segmented industries. Further, this study examines the heterogeneous impact of non-digital technological innovation on digital entrepreneurship based on the differences in location, time-point, and digital governance; third, drawing on the principle of knowledge space spillover, constructing instrumental variables effectively alleviates the endogeneity problem, providing methodological reference for related research. The research in this paper reveals, to a certain extent, the intrinsic mechanism of non-digital technological innovation to promote digital innovation and entrepreneurship, which helps government departments to be more targeted to build an open exchange platform for inter-industry innovation and entrepreneurship cooperation, as well as to provide policy support for the digital transformation of traditional industry incumbents and digital enterprise innovation and entrepreneurship, so as to promote the digital transformation of the city’s economy and to accelerate the formation of new quality productive forces.