A firm’s level of innovativeness is regarded as an indicator of its creativity, competitiveness, and performance. An understanding of the processes that lead to innovativeness is therefore crucial to scholars and practitioners. This makes innovativeness assessment a necessity, especially for firms. Perplexingly, there are few innovativeness studies on resource-intensive industrial sectors, such as petroleum, in African countries. This paper is a contribution to filling the knowledge gap. The study used item means to analyse data from a cross-sectional survey. The findings show that, while overall the petroleum firms were barely innovative, they performed better in terms of the non-technological aspects of innovativeness.