Can Digital Transformation Promote Innovation Performance in Manufacturing Enterprises? The Mediating Role of R&D Capability

Innovation is a necessary guarantee for the long-term survival of an enterprise, and Research and Development (R&D) is the source of enterprise innovation. In the situation where the government is comprehensively promoting the strategy of manufacturing power and digital China, it is becoming increasingly important for manufacturing enterprises to stimulate enterprise innovation through digital transformation. At the same time, the innovation achievements of enterprises are inseparable from its R&D activities. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore the influence mechanism of digital transformation on process innovation performance and product innovation performance of manufacturing enterprises. In this process, this paper puts exploratory R&D capability and exploitative R&D capability as mediating variables into the above research framework. The results show that digital transformation directly promotes the process innovation performance and product innovation performance of manufacturing enterprises. Moreover, the two types of R&D capabilities play the same mediating role in the process of digital transformation boosting enterprise innovation performance, but their indirect mechanisms are different. The above conclusions remain valid after the robustness test. In addition, the heterogeneity test results show that the promotional effect of digital transformation on the innovation performance of manufacturing enterprises has sectoral differences. Only the digital transformation of the mechanical equipment manufacturing sector has a positive effect on two types of innovation performance. In general, the higher the technology content of an enterprises is, the more obviously the digital transformation affects its innovation performance. The above findings have contributed to revealing the specific role and practical significance of Chinese manufacturing enterprises in improving innovation performance based on digital transformation.