Based on the difference of external partners, this study classifies external collaboration into firm-firm collaboration and firm-university collaboration, and explores their impacts on innovation performance of SMEs respectively. At the same time, this paper explores the contingency mechanism by empirically testing the moderating effects of entrepreneurial orientation and cooperation experience. By conducting hierarchical regression analysis on the sample data of 214 manufacturing SMEs in China, the results show that both firm-firm collaboration and firm-university collaboration have positive impacts on innovation performance of SMEs, and firm-firm collaboration has a stronger effect on performance than firm-university collaboration; entrepreneurial orientation positively moderates the relationships between firm-firm collaboration, firm-university collaboration and innovation performance of SMEs; cooperation experience positively moderates the relationship between firm-firm collaboration and innovation performance of SMEs.