Abstract: Innovation is the power source of economic growth, and performance is the decisive factor of enterprise innovation. Based on the data of Chinese listed companies from 2007 to 2015, the relationships between the directions of performance change and innovation are tested. The results show that the innovation behaviors are obvious different between the company of performance growth and the company of performance decline: there is a significant inverted U-shaped relationship between the degree of performance decline and the innovation intensity, but there is a significant U-shaped relationship between the degree of performance growth and the innovation intensity, and the above relationships show obvious differences with the different of property rights, that is, the innovation has significant impacts on both the short-term and the long-term value improvement to the company of performance decline, but only has a significant impact on the short-term value improvement to the company of performance growth.

Key words: performance change, company innovation, performance decline, performance growth, value improvement