Innovation has increasingly become important to nation’s competitiveness over the past decades as a result of incremental and radical change in how public and private sectors perform its activities that propel economic growth under globalization. The paper aims to shed light on how innovation inputs and outputs, as ranked in Global Innovation Index or GII, impact gross domestic product or GDP in 2015. By studying the various Asian countries of different stages of economic development including Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, and South Korea, the statistical results revealed multiple folds. First, Singapore, Australia, and South Korea are top innovation performing countries that invest heavily in their human capital, research and infrastructure. Second, Malaysia is advancing its infrastructure, market and business sophistication and moving from efficiency-driven economy to innovation-driven economy. However, Thailand encounters challenge in escaping from middle-income trap in efficiency-driven economy as evidenced in its middle-of-the-road position in its innovation inputs, outputs in correlation to GDP per capita. The recommendation to Thailand includes increasing investment in human capital and research, infrastructure, market and business sophistication, and creative outputs. The study supports the theories of knowledge -based view and dynamic capabilities where nation requires continuously creating heterogeneous knowledge as strategic resources and orchestrating and innovatively configuring them to match with future opportunities to accelerate its GDP growth.