Productivity is a key driver of high-quality economic development and social progress. New quality productive forces are an advanced type of productive forces, whose main characteristics include significant growth in total factor productivity, with innovation as a feature and high quality as a key element. New quality productive forces emphasize innovation, intelligence and efficiency to improve productivity, reduce costs and thus improve product quality to meet the needs of a competitive marketplace. Promoting the development of new quality productive forces can help enterprises better adapt to market changes, enhance competitiveness and achieve sustainable development. At the same time, the digital element is an important factor in promoting the development of the digital economy, fostering a new type of growth momentum and enhancing national competitiveness. The establishment of the national digital innovation and development pilot zone is not only of great significance in promoting the development of the digital economy, fostering new growth momentum, enhancing national competitiveness, promoting the upgrading of the industrial structure as well as facilitating the construction of the innovation system, but also a key force in upgrading new quality productive forces. In the face of the current development trend that digital element as an important innovation element is increasingly entering into all aspects and processes of economic and social development, it is of great significance to understand and deepen the research on its relationship with new quality productive forces. Although existing literature has conducted some research on new quality productive forces from the perspective of the digital economy, little literature has analyzed them from the perspective of policies related to the digital economy. Therefore, on the basis of clarifying the impact mechanism of the establishment of the national digital economy innovation and development pilot zone on new quality productive forces, this paper makes use of panel data of 30 provinces in China from 2012 to 2022 to construct a new quality productive forces evaluation index system of new quality workers, new quality labour materials and new quality labour objects, and explores the impact of the establishment of the pilot zones on new quality productive forces with the help of a difference-in-difference model. The study finds that: 1) The establishment of the pilot zones has a significant positive effect on the improvement of the level of new quality productivity, with the improvement effect reaching about 10 per cent. This conclusion remains valid after a series of robustness tests such as parallel trend tests and sensitivity tests. 2) Heterogeneity analyses find that the positive effect of the establishment of the pilot zones is greater for provinces with low levels of financial development, intelligence and digitization. 3) Mechanism analysis finds that the establishment of the pilot zones has contributed to the development of new quality productive forces through vigorous promotion of technological innovation, formation of a cluster effect of senior talents and promotion of digital transformation. Based on this, the government should strengthen the summary and promotion of the typical experience of national digital economy innovation and development, optimize the layout of the pilot zones and stimulate the multi-dimensional path of the pilot zones to influence new quality productivity, so as to achieve sustainable economic development and improve the level of new quality productivity.