This paper examines the impact of global value chains on firms’ innovation capabilities. Using the United Nations Broad Economic Categories (BEC) system to identify offshoring-related intermediate imports, we study contracting out production over the period 2001–2014 from about 7,000 mainly small Swedish manufacturing firms to six different destinations and test hypotheses on improvements and outcomes of innovation capabilities. Our empirical findings show that the strategy to participate in global value chains increases firms’ innovative capability regardless of firms’ technology intensity. The results are robust to a wide set of controls and in line with predictions in recent models of directed technical change.