<p>Against the backdrop of China's economy moving toward high-quality development, green innovation has emerged as a critical path for addressing resource and environmental constraints and achieving sustainable development. How voluntary environmental regulation acts as an important environmental governance tool to effectively stimulate enterprises' green innovation behavior is an urgent issue that requires in-depth theoretical and practical exploration. Given this context, the stakeholder, social learning, upper echelons, and absorptive capacity theories were integrated to construct a moderated mediation model. Data on manufacturing companies listed on China's Shanghai and Shenzhen A-shares from 2012 to 2021 were analyzed using a negative binomial regression to examine the mechanism of voluntary environmental regulation affecting green innovation in enterprises. The empirical results show that voluntary environmental regulation significantly promotes green innovation in enterprises, and that executive green cognition plays a partial mediating role in the relationship between voluntary environmental regulation and green innovation. In addition, it is shown that absorptive capacity positively moderates the promoting effect of voluntary environmental regulation on executive green cognition and strengthens the mediating role of executive green cognition between voluntary environmental regulation and green innovation in enterprises. It was further found that the incentive effect of voluntary environmental regulation on green innovation in enterprises exhibits heterogeneity in lifecycle and factor density. Compared to the formation-stage, decline-stage, labor-intensive, and capital-intensive enterprises, voluntary environmental regulation promotes green innovation more significantly in growth-stage, maturity-stage, and technology-intensive enterprises. Our findings revealed the intrinsic mechanism through which voluntary environmental regulation affects green innovation from a hybrid perspective of cognition and capacity, thereby expanding the scholarly discourse on corporate green innovation under voluntary environmental regulation frameworks and providing actionable insights for policymakers, to refine environmental governance strategies, and for corporate actors, to advance green innovation initiatives.</p> Graphical Abstract <p>Research Model and Hypothesis Testing Results</p> <p></p>