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| Digital Technology Concentration and Enterprise Innovation:The Inverted U-shaped Relationship and the Transformation |
| Ling Shixian1,Ling Hongcheng2,Ji Mengjia1 |
| (1.Business School, Shandong University, Weihai 264209, China; 2. Institute of Industrial Economics,Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics, Nanchang 330013,China) |
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Abstract The digital transformation of enterprises has given great new momentum to enterprise innovation. Digital transformation includes two aspects: the R&D of underlying digital technology and its application which includes various technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing and big data, and they require huge human and capital investment. Faced with rich digital technologies, how should enterprises choose and promote enterprise innovation with digital transformation? This requires a study of the concentration of digital technology. The paper attempts to study the impact of digital technology concentration on enterprise innovation to provide theoretical and empirical support for promoting the digital transformation of enterprises and promoting enterprise innovation.It is expected to provide empirical evidence for a deeper understanding of the non-linear impact of digital technology concentration on enterprise innovation and for making full use of the moderating mechanism to promote enterprise innovation. #br#The paper selects A-share companies from 2007 to 2020 as the research sample. After processing, 35 669 observations from 3 846 listed companies are obtained. Firstly, the annual reports of listed companies are obtained by Python and the text contents are extracted through Java PDFbox library, and the digital technology concentration is measured with Herfindahl-Hirschman index. Secondly,a multiple regression model is constructed to verify the nonlinear relationship between digital technology concentration and enterprise innovation. Thirdly,a mediating effect model is constructed to test the mechanisms of digital technology concentration on enterprise innovation. #br#The results show that there is a significant inverted U-shaped relationship between digital technology concentration and enterprise innovation. That is, as digital technology concentration increases, enterprise innovation output increases continuously, but it presents a phenomenon of marginal decreasing of enterprise innovation output, and when digital technology concentration is too high, enterprises face major breakthrough innovation barriers which will inhibit technological innovation. The mechanism analysis shows that human resource integration ability and R&D investment intensity play the moderating roles. As the moderating variable increases, it can make the inflection point of the inverted U-shaped curve shift to the left, and gradually flatten the inverted U-shaped curve, and when the moderating variable breaks the threshold of the inflection point, it will make the inverted U-shaped curve transform into a U-shaped curve, and thus with the increase of the moderating variables,it can further promote enterprise innovation.#br#The contributions of this study are as follows. First, this study is the first to adopt the digital technology concentration to measure the digital transformation of enterprises. The previous literature has mainly used the frequency or ratio of digital technology words, or the proportion of intangible digital assets as a proxy variable of digital transformation. Given the variety of digital technologies and the constraints of capital and talent, enterprises are often in a digital transformation dilemma. This study takes digital technology concentration as the variable for digital transformation of enterprises,and overcomes the shortage of existing variables. Second, this paper provides a new perspective on the in-depth understanding of the relationship between enterprise digital transformation and enterprise innovation, and provides reference for the selection of digital technology quantity for enterprise. In digital transformation, enterprises should focus on a few areas of digital technologies. Most of the literature has confirmed that digital transformation as a whole can significantly promote enterprise innovation, but this study finds that a focus on technology areas can help promote enterprise innovation in the early stage of digital transformation, but as the research progresses, the difficulty of innovation will gradually increase, and the marginal innovation output will distinguish and eventually inhibit enterprise innovation. Third, the empirical evidence of a strong moderating effect is provided for promoting enterprise innovation with digital technology. The two most important moderating variables, namely human resource integration capability and R&D investment intensity are analyzed respectively. The moderating effects of human capital integration ability and R&D investment intensity can change the inverted U-shaped curve to a U-shaped curve. These two moderating variables play significant moderating roles between digital technology concentration and enterprise innovation, and can further promote the role of digital technology in enterprise innovation.#br#
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Received: 09 September 2022
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