Innovation is the foundation that drives and decides the success of the enterprise. However, while many of Vietnamese firms are highly aware of the important role of innovation, less of them have achieved innovation performance. Research on innovation performance has been done in many developed economies, but it is very few in developing economies such as Vietnam. In order to help Vietnamese enterprises better understand the factors that affect the level of innovation performance, this research verifies the relationship between the search, exploration activity and innovation performance of enterprises in HCMC, based on research model of Aloini and Martini (2013) - The search is reflected by 4 factors: Learning about market, managing idea generation, network management system, openness to external sources; Exploration activity is reflected by 2 factors: Exploratory innovation, competence exploration. These are the factors that influence innovation performance strongly. The analysis of data collected from 252 Vietnamese enterprises in HCMC reveals that high level of search leads to high level of exploration activities and high level of exploration activities leads to high level of innovation performance. Management implications have been proposed to improve innovation performance.