Corporate innovation is an important driver of a firm’s value and long-term growth. Drawing on upper echelon theory, this paper examines the effect of marital status of corporate executives on firms’ innovation measured by R&D productivity. We document a strong connection between unmarried Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 1500 companies and elevated levels of corporate innovation. The association prevails when we control for a set of CEO attributes and adopt alternative identification strategies such as propensity score matching and difference-in-difference analysis. Moreover, the observed positive impact is more pronounced when CEO has higher discretion proxied by lower institutional shareholding and smaller firm size. Further evidence indicates that single CEOs generate more high impact innovation and bear greater tolerance for failure. Our findings have potential implications for understanding variations in innovation practices and for identifying CEO who are likely to excel at innovation.