Abstract: With the rapid development of digital economy, how to adapt to the new era to achieve innovative development and reshape the international competitive advantage has gradually become an important issue for Chinese enterprises. As a new production factor, the wide application of digital technology provides enterprises with the possibility to accelerate innovation. Through digital transformation, enterprises can highly link various traditional innovation nodes, which can help them reduce market transaction costs and improve innovation R&D efficiency to the maximum extent. However, the application of digital technology itself is also very challenging, and the high costs and uncertainty risks associated with digital transformation can consume the innovation benefits brought by digital transformation. As a result, the economic consequences of digital transformation have become an important issue for scholars, given the interplay between the positive and negative effects of digital transformation. Along with the digital transformation, the accessibility and scalability of the world's innovation resources have led to the fact that companies are no longer limited to their internal innovation knowledge and resources, and more and more Chinese companies are choosing to acquire more innovation resources through overseas investments in order to quickly update and iterate themselves. As an important decision-making act, the implementation of internationalization strategy will be influenced by the digital transformation of enterprises. In practice, a large number of multinational enterprises have relied on digital transformation to promote their international expansion and thus achieve global access to innovation resources and innovation resource integration. However, there is still a gap in academic research on the role of internationalization strategy in the relationship between digital transformation and corporate innovation and its mechanism of action, and there is a lack of reasonable theoretical interpretation of the path dependence of corporate digital transformation on corporate innovation. In addition, the relationship between digitalization and innovation in multinational enterprises is not a simple cause-and-effect relationship of “digital transformation-corporate innovation realization”. In the process of using digital transformation to achieve innovation, firms need to cultivate dynamic capabilities to mobilize, utilize, and deploy key resources across organizational boundaries, but existing studies do not reveal in detail whether the innovation effects of digital transformation are affected by firms' dynamic capabilities, and cannot theoretically explain the situational dependence of digital transformation on firm innovation.
This paper takes 367 high-technology firms listed in Chinese A-shares from 2010 to 2019 as research objects to analyze the impact of digital transformation on corporate innovation, and introduces internationalization strategy as a mediating variable to explain the specific path of digital transformation affecting corporate innovation, and analyzes the moderating role of dynamic capabilities of firms on the relationship between digital transformation and corporate innovation based on dynamic capabilities theory.
The empirical results show that: digital transformation can significantly promote corporate innovation, and the above findings still hold after a series of endogeneity and robustness tests; digital transformation can both accelerate and regulate the internationalization process; internationalization strategy plays a significant mediating effect between digital transformation and corporate innovation. That is, digital transformation not only promotes innovation by accelerating firms' overseas investment, which helps them gain first-mover advantage, but also promotes innovation by regulating their overseas investment process and achieving a regular investment rhythm. Furthermore, firms' dynamic capabilities have a significant moderating effect on the relationship between digital transformation and innovation, which shows that the stronger the firms' dynamic capabilities are, the greater the impact of digital transformation on firms' innovation.

Key words: digital transformation, internationalization speed, internationalization rhythm, dynamic capability, enterprise innovation

摘要： 以2010—2019年推行数字化转型的高技术跨国企业为研究样本,分析数字化转型对企业创新的影响,并引入国际化战略作为中介变量来解释数字化转型影响企业创新的具体路径,依据动态能力理论分析企业动态能力对数字化转型与企业创新关系的调节作用。实证结果表明:数字化转型与企业创新具有正相关性;数字化转型既可加快企业国际化速度,又可规范国际化进程;国际化战略是企业数字化转型促进创新的有效途径,即数字化转型不仅通过加速企业海外投资,助推企业获得先发优势进而促进企业创新;还通过规范企业海外投资进程,实现规律性的投资节奏促进企业创新;此外,企业动态能力对数字化转型与创新的关系有显著调节作用,表现为企业动态能力越强,数字化转型对企业创新的影响越大。

关键词: 数字化转型, 国际化速度, 国际化节奏, 动态能力, 企业创新