Patient capital provides long-term and stable financial support for breakthrough innovation, which is crucial to the development of nations and enterprises. And institutional investors are one of the key targets for cultivating patient capital. Yet there is a scarcity of discussion regarding the impact of institutional investors on breakthrough innovation when they become common owners. We focused on the non-financial common institutional owners with characteristics of patient capital and investigated its impact on corporate breakthrough innovation by the samples of non-financial listed companies in Chinese A-share market from 2007 to 2022. The results of the empirically examination showed that: (1) Non-financial common institutional ownership significantly promotes corporate disruptive innovation; (2) non-financial common institutional owners promote breakthrough innovation by guiding and supervising the adjustment of corporate resource allocation and increasing funds and personnel to research and development (R&D) investment; executive innovation consciousness enhances the promotional effect while strategic aggressiveness suppresses it; and (3) it is more pronounced in growing companies, and non-high-tech companies; non-financial common institutional investors that have held shares for more than one year have a more significant promotional effect on corporate disruptive innovation activities. This paper has enriched the relevant research on the impact of common institutional ownership on innovation and it will provide practical evidence for guiding and regulating patient capital to empower the development of new productive forces.