Figuring out the impact of external innovation network on corporate innovation will contribute to optimize the innovation system. However, as an important node in the innovation network, the non-local research and development organization has not received sufficient attention from scholars. Using manually collected data of offsite R&D organizations from 2009-2019, we examine the impact of non-local R&D organizations on corporate innovation, the influence mechanism, and the spillover effect. We find that the inter-regional R&D organizations promote corporate innovation, and the effect is long-term. Specially, the degree of business diversity, technology absorbing ability and firms’ local knowledge resources positively strengthen the relationship between the non-local R&D organizations and corporate innovation. Further mechanism tests show that offsite R&D organizations promote corporate innovation via absorbing the knowledge of external spillover and optimizing and integrating innovation resources. Moreover, we also find that the innovation of counterparts in the same industry and city increase when a business established inter-regional R&D organizations, indicating that inter-regional R&D organizations have innovation spillover effects. Our findings reveal the impact of establishing non-local R&D centers on corporate innovation and provide a reference for businesses to optimize the use of innovation resources and formulate regional innovation policies.