As strategic emerging industries gradually become the engine of future economic and social development, enhancing the innovation performance of strategic emerging industries is a significant booster to China's innovation capability. The critical methods of the development for this industry is to strengthen the independent innovation ability and promote the innovation performance to advance the core competitiveness. In order to grab the market share, a large number of enterprises have invested in those industries such as photovoltaic, new energy, semiconductor chip, etc., thus creating the investment surge. It was first proposed by Lin Yifu, referring to the excessive concentration of enterprise investment in a certain industry caused by lack of information, which is unique to developing countries and often leads to severe overcapacity. Although the investment surge has swelled in recent years in the strategic emerging industry, does the enterprises' large-scale investment promote innovation performance as expected? Currently, most relevant academic research focus on the mechanism with the perspective of government and market, including government subsidy, supportive industry policy, increasing demand of financial markets and market competition. This paper aims to explore the investment surge in the development of strategic emerging industries and investigate the impact of the increasing firm investment on innovation performance.#br#The methodology is to analyze sample A-share listed companies from the Comprehensive Index of China's Strategic Emerging Industries from 2008 to 2019 through group regression and instrumental variables. Some data are excluded from the pool, including data of financial industry, *ST, ST and PT stocks, companies without complete financial information, and companies which have not been in the stock market for enough time or during the studied time period. As a result, 7 440 samples from 794 enterprises are selected for the empirical study to explore whether the investment surge in strategic emerging industries can effectively promote the innovation performance that refers to both the innovation output and the conversion rate of innovation achievement.#br#The results show that from the perspective of time dimension, the first wave of investment surge in strategic emerging industries is triggered by policy from 2010 to 2012, and the second wave is jointly driven by market and policy from 2015 to 2019, which has a quite higher level of investment expenditure and over-investment. In either wave of investment surge, enterprise investment can effectively improve innovation output. While in the stage without investment surge, the impact is no longer significant. The effect on innovation output is more obvious in the first wave due to the first-move advantage. From the perspective of different types of strategic emerging enterprises, the impact of firm investment on innovation output is still significantly positive. The conversion rate of firm investment to innovation achievement is an inverted U-shaped curve for labor-intensive, resource-intensive enterprises, and state-owned enterprises, while for technology-intensive enterprises, and non-state-owned enterprises, the conversion rate is purely positively correlated.#br#To summarize, this paper uses listed companies in strategic emerging industries as research samples and conducts empirical analysis of the impact of firm investment on innovation performance under the investment surge with different inducements. The work provides a theoretical basis for the application of investment surge in strategic emerging industries and supplements existing research about the investment surge and enterprise innovation by applying a new methodology. Moreover, the heterogeneity test is carried out from the perspectives of industry and ownership, in order to offer effective suggestions for policy and business decision-making. The suggestions are as follows. (1) The government should encourage and promote business investment while establishing early warning system to avoid over-investment and depressed innovation efficiency. (2) The government is responsible for identifying various stages during the investment surge and guiding the rational timing for enterprise investment to maximize the investment effectiveness. (3) Due to the heterogeneity among different enterprises, the government's supportive policy is supposed to be more differentiated, particularly for those technology-intensive and non-state-owned enterprises.#br#