In the technology-intensive medical industry,innovation serves as the core competitiveness while key employees are backbones of innovation activities.The papaer analyzes the impact mechanism of key employees on innovation activities and effi-ciency from pharmaceutical enterprisesbased on equity incentive.and selects annual data from 94 listed pharmaceutical compa-nies that implemented equity incentives from 2012 to 2019 and quarterly data from 82 listed pharmaceutical companies for verifi-cation.The results confirm that the core employees under equity incentives can promote innovation output and efficiency,and the incentive effect is significantly positively correlated with the proportion of incentives.Therefore,in order to improve innovation output and efficiency,pharmaceutical companies should attach importance to the role of core employees,especially R&D person-nel.