In the international investment theory, according to the traditional viewpoint the firms with product innovation have greater motivation for foreign direct investment, but the practice of firms in developing countries in recent years indicate that the enterprises which in order to obtain innovation resources also have a great motivation for foreign direct investment. In this paper, we attend to test these two standpoints from the perspective of product innovation and foreign direct investment speed. We match the Database of China’s Industrial Enterprises and the List of Overseas Investment Enterprises (Institutions) to build a micro empirical database, and measure the speed of foreign direct investment and product innovation. Based on this, our empirical research finds that, in the aspect of product innovation orientation, enterprises with no product innovation have a faster speed of foreign direct investment than the ones with product innovation; however, in the internal of enterprises with product innovation, the rise of the degree of innovation can accelerate the speed of foreign direct investment. Furthermore, we use the method of propensity score matching to effect of product innovation tendency on foreign direct investment speed, and verify the robustness of our empirical results.