Abstract：China’s economy is facing a complex and severe external environment, as well as the domestic situation of shrinking demand, supply shock, and weakening expectations. The market uncertainties faced by China’s manufacturing enterprises primarily comes from the supply side impact, and the import dependence of intermediate goods constitutes the principal limit of the domestic industrial chain cycle. Therefore, manufacturing enterprises often adopt import substitution or product import conversion strategies to resolve the impact of market uncertainties. Under the background of the implementation of the “integration of digital economy and real economy” policy, it is of great theoretical value and practical significance to explore whether enterprises’ import conversion of digital products can lead to sustainable digital innovation and the endogenous correlation mechanism between the two and the formation mechanism of enterprises’ sustainable digital innovation. This paper uses the matched data of Chinese manufacturing industrial enterprises, customs and patents from 2000 to 2014 to identify the causal relationship between imported product conversion and sustainable digital innovation of enterprises and clearly describes the conversion behavior, conversion intensity and conversion scope of imported products at the micro enterprise-product level. The paper accurately divides enterprise digital innovation into three types of innovation: persistent digital innovation, temporary digital innovation, and one-off digital innovation. It also deeply analyzes the causes and internal mechanisms of enterprises’ import transformation affecting sustainable digital innovation. Through staggered DID and other causal inference methods, the possible dynamic impact of import product peak transformation on sustainable innovation is tested, and the impact of import product source transformation on sustainable innovation is further analyzed through the heterogeneity test. This paper attempts to make up for the inadequacies of the existing literature. The possible marginal contributions include: first, defining the differences between persistent digital innovation, temporary digital innovation and one-off digital innovation; second, establishing the endogenous relationship and influence mechanisms between import conversion of digital products and sustainable digital innovation of enterprises, and deeply explore the source of sustainable digital innovation; third, tracing the source of enterprise continuous digital innovation, seeking the inevitable correlation between enterprise industrial chain and supply chain resilience and digital innovation resilience, and exploring the endogenous realization mechanism of enterprise continuous digital innovation. The main research conclusions are as follows: Firstly, the increase of import conversion amount or type expansion has a positive impact on enterprises’ sustainable digital innovation, while the marginal effect on temporary digital innovation and one-off digital innovation enterprises is negative, indicating that enterprises with sustainable digital innovation have a more stable upstream supply chain and stronger innovation resilience. Secondly, by constructing a simulation of the peak impact event of the import amount of enterprises to describe the impact of import conversion decision on the sustainable digital innovation of enterprises, we find that the processing trade enterprises with high dependence on digital products are more likely to face the adverse impact. Thirdly, by further exploring the causes of sustainable digital innovation, it has been found that factor allocation and reorganization, value chain division and supply and demand information sharing are the main approach to the sustainable digital innovation of enterprises, and process intelligence, market scale expansion and enterprise internationalization are moderating effects of sustainable digital innovation of enterprises. The expansion analysis shows that converting diversification and nearshoring of digital product imports plays an essential role in the sustainable digital innovation of enterprises. The above research conclusions show that the upstream and downstream relationship of the supply chain should be strengthened to stabilize the two-way connection between supply and demand, and the upstream stability of the supply chain plays a vital role in the formation of the innovation resilience of downstream manufacturing enterprises. Enterprises’ digital transformation and sustainable digital innovation should break through the constraints of traditional factor endowments. Factor configuration reorganization, industrial chain optimization and upgrading, and sharing information about enterprises based on digital product import conversion are the critical paths to the enhanced sustainable digital innovation capabilities of enterprises.
姚瑶, 杨高举. 数字产品进口转换是否引致企业持续数字创新：一蹴而就还是日积月累？[J]. 浙江大学学报(人文社会科学版), 2024, 54(6): 24-43.
Yao Yao, Yang Gaoju. Does Import Conversion of Digital Products Affect Enterprises’ Continuous Digital Innovation: “Accomplished Overnight” or “Day and Month Cumulative”. JOURNAL OF ZHEJIANG UNIVERSITY, 2024, 54(6): 24-43.
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