The innovative activity of industrial enterprises is the key to their successful operation and maintaining competitiveness in the market. The useful of innovations in product manufacturing technology, as well as in the management and control system, allows not only to maintain competitive positions but also to strengthen them. However, any innovative activity requires financial investments. Assessing the expediency of these investments, ensuring the possibility of comparing the planned results with the costs of innovation, is a problematic area of this work. Despite the certain development and proposals of solutions in this area, the problem of accurate assessment of the effectiveness of innovations remains relevant. This is important to the specifics of industrial enterprises, their industry affiliation, financial and other capabilities. As practice and set publications on this topic show, there is no single method for evaluating the effectiveness of innovations. The decision to invest in innovation is influenced by many factors that are different for each business entity. Most owners and managers, when evaluating innovative projects, solve the problem of choice, relying on traditional methods of calculating performance indicators and considering an innovative project as an investment. Such methods include calculations of net discounted income, internal rate of return, payback period of the project, profitability index, and other indicators. However, when using these methods, the qualitative effects of the introduction and application of innovations are not taken into account. In addition, the quantitative effects expected from the use of innovations are also predictive values evaluated by experts. Accordingly, there is always a possibility that these effects will not be obtained. Decision making on the investment of an innovative project becomes more complicated if we are talking about several projects. Then making a decision that reduces to a binary value (the project is accepted/the project is rejected) turns into a choice task. Such a problem is characterized by a larger dimension, therefore, an increased complexity of the solution. The more alternatives, the higher the difficulty (the harder the choice). The article proposes a method for fuzzy evaluation of the effectiveness of innovative projects in industry, which is based on the formation of a system of linguistic expert rules. This system is being developed based on the results of active work with experts in industrial innovation and represents a fuzzy knowledge base. As a criterion for the effectiveness of such a system, the level of consistency of the solutions proposed by the system with expert assessments of the effectiveness of an innovative project serves. If the system shows results that are practically indistinguishable from the results issued by the expert group, then a decision is made on its operation.