The growing level of competition on the national and world markets forces domestic industrial enterprises to improve their own organizational, production, and sales business processes, introduce innovations, and search for new approaches to ensure sustainable development. The sustainable development of industrial enterprises presupposes the general possibilities of their effective, balanced, continuous functioning, which is not possible without taking into account and minimizing the impact of various types of risks, i.e. risk tolerance management. The purpose of the article is to improve the definition of the concept of risk tolerance of industrial enterprises as a prerequisite for ensuring their sustainable development on an innovative basis. Research methods: comparative analysis, comparative-decompositional analysis, generalization, systematization. Given the lack of unanimous opinion among scientists regarding the definition of the concept of risk tolerance of enterprises, the authors will conduct a comparative and comparative-decomposition analysis of this definition. It is proposed to understand the ability of the potential of an industrial enterprise to ensure sustainable development and achievement of planned performance indicators on the basis of resistance to risks in all types of organizational, production, sales (including innovation) activities. This understanding of the risk resistance of industrial enterprises allows specifying the basis for ensuring risk resistance (potential) and forming/improving their management system taking into account modern requirements for organizational transformations of business entities and ensuring sustainable development on an innovative basis. In the future, the results of this study can be used to improve the risk management mechanism at domestic industrial enterprises.