From the perspective of heterogeneity of firms’ innovation motivation, we analyze the internal mechanism between marketization institution environment and firms’ innovation motivations, using the data of China’s manufacturing industry listed firms from 2005 to 2019. We find that, the marketization institutional reform can strengthen the vertical innovation motivation and weaken the horizontal innovation motivation, which means that there are “institutional dividend effects” in the firms’ innovation behaviors. After dividing the firms into different groups by ownership, region and high-tech intensity, we find that the “institutional dividend effects” mainly focus in the non-state-owned group, middle area and west area group, and both in the high-tech and non-high-tech group. Our findings can provide some evidences for the policy design and firms’ strategy formulation.