Hospitals have sought to improve their performance and innovativeness has been highlighted as an ally in this mission. The objective of the research was to verify whether the perception of innovativeness of hospital managers is related to the performance of their organizations. Innovativeness was defined as a measure of the company's ability to innovate and was operationalized through variables related to organizational innovation and the firm's perceived innovation. Performance was defined by the hospital's efficiency in using the resources available to provide services. The results of a survey conducted with managers of 20 private hospitals belonging to the largest health insurance plan operator in Brazil, showed that perceived innovativeness has an inverse relation with technical efficiency: the greater the capacity or propensity of the company to innovate, both perceived by the internal culture of the organization and by its way of acting in the market, the lower the technical efficiency of the hospital.