This paper investigates firm innovation and its influences on firm performance at different stages of organizational life cycle. Previous studies have discussed this relationship, although research on the emerging markets for the transition economy remains scarce. This study supplements the insufficiency by using the China Shanghai and Shenzhen listed corporations from 2001 to 2011. Our proxies are diversified with more details. We classify the corporation based on the CSRC classification. We measure firm innovation by the number of patents a firm owns and patent renewal data, adjusted patent and patents weight, which provide more information than the R&D expenditure ratio. We divide the entire period into four different life cycle stages and determine that the organizational life cycle theory in Chinese listed corporations only exist in SME corporations that hold patents from 1 to 100. The correlation between organizational life cycle and innovation in non-SME corporations and full sample could not be found because almost half of the firms were publicly owned.