This paper extracts the industrial policy information from the government work reports of 205 prefecture level cities from 2008 to 2018, and empirically analyzes the heterogeneous effects of high-tech industrial policies in different prefecture level cities, as well as the effects and reasons of prefecture level municipal governments’ “following the trend” of superior governments when formulating high-tech industrial policies. First, high-tech industrial policy is only effective in cities with good “innovation endowment”. Further analysis shows that “innovation endowment” constitutes the boundary condition for the effectiveness of high-tech industrial policy; Second, cities with poor “innovation endowment” tend to keep consistent with the policies of their superiors, and the industrial policies of these cities “following the trend” of their superiors are significantly detrimental to the innovation of local industries, because the industries targeted by the “following the trend” policy do not have advantages locally; Third, different from the existing research, this paper does not find that the local government’s “follow the trend” superior policy can be approved for more development zone projects. The research of this paper means that local governments should formulate industrial policies that are suitable for the development of local industries according to local conditions, and should not blindly follow the trend.