Institutions play a significant role in spurring a country's innovative activities.However, to the best of our knowledge, the relative importance of institutions in the innovationeconomic complexity link remains unexplored.This study examines the role of institutional quality in moderating the impact of innovation on economic complexity for 68 countries from 1996 to 2020.We employed various estimation techniques for the analysis, including the generalized method of moments (GMM), pooled ordinary