Responsible investing has received growing interest globally, yet significant challenges remain in determining how to fully realize and measure the profitable impact of the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) effort. By examining a sample of U.S.-listed firms, this paper provides novel evidence that ownership by socially responsible institutional investors (SRIO) is positively associated with firm innovations. This impact holds across heterogeneous measures of innovation success on originality and impact, and the results are robust after addressing the potential endogeneity issues. Our results shed light on the consequences of having socially responsible investors on corporate innovation performance.