Although innovation and corporate social responsibility (CSR) is becoming two major interrelated research topics, the interplay between them remains poorly understood. Thus, we examined the role of CSR on the different processes of innovation in an empirical study. Using a sample of Chinese firms, this study shows that CSR can strengthen the positive linkage between R&D investment and innovation outcome (measured by counts of patents) in research and development (R&D) process. However, our finding shows that the interaction between CSR and counts of patents has a negative impact on firm market value in the commercialization process, probably because of the excessive use of firm limited resources, which leads to the decline of firm performance.