School of Economics and Management, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116024, China.
J Environ Manage. 2023 Nov 1;345:118841. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2023.118841. Epub 2023 Aug 22.
Confronted with the treacherous digital wave and the aggressive environmental challenges, digital technology and green innovation are becoming critical tools for corporations to secure a sustainable advantage. The significance of identifying the role of digital technology application on corporate green innovation has been widely debated in the extant literature. Nevertheless, few researchers have investigated the inherent mechanism between them from the resource allocation perspective. From this research gap, we construct a theoretical model of the inherent mechanism by which digital technology application affects corporate green innovation, validate it using listed corporations in China from 2011 to 2020, and further investigate the differences in their inherent mechanism triggered by property rights and industry competition. We found that digital technology application is effective in promoting corporate green innovation. Stronger green innovation effect of digital technology application in state-owned corporations and those in highly competitive industries. The inherent mechanism between them manifest in optimizing the allocation of conventional labor, expanding the scale of non-conventional labor, and enhancing investment in R&D and digital infrastructure capital. We further explored that the impact of applying digital technology to optimize conventional labor allocation, expand non-conventional labor scale, and enhance investment in R&D and digital infrastructure capital is stronger for corporations in highly competitive industries than those in lowly competitive industries. The difference is that the role of the digital technology application in boosting capital investment in R&D does not differ across corporations with different property rights. Findings provide theoretical and empirical evidence on effectively developing the digital technology application's green innovative effects.
面对变幻莫测的数字浪潮和咄咄逼人的环境挑战，数字技术和绿色创新正成为企业获取可持续竞争优势的关键手段。数字技术应用对企业绿色创新的作用在现有文献中已被广泛讨论。然而，很少有研究从资源配置的角度探讨它们之间的内在机制。基于这一研究空白，我们构建了一个数字技术应用影响企业绿色创新的内在机制理论模型，使用 2011 年至 2020 年中国上市公司的数据进行了验证，并进一步研究了产权和产业竞争引发的内在机制差异。研究结果表明，数字技术应用对企业绿色创新具有显著的促进作用。在国有企业和竞争激烈的行业中，数字技术应用对绿色创新的促进作用更为明显。它们之间的内在机制体现在优化常规劳动力配置、扩大非常规劳动力规模以及增加研发和数字基础设施资本投资上。我们进一步发现，数字技术在优化常规劳动力配置、扩大非常规劳动力规模以及增加研发和数字基础设施资本投资方面的应用对竞争激烈行业的企业的影响大于竞争不激烈行业的企业。区别在于，数字技术应用在促进研发资本投资方面的作用在不同产权性质的企业中没有差异。研究结果为有效发挥数字技术应用的绿色创新效应提供了理论和经验证据。
