Ambidextrous innovation and digital transformation

Ambidextrous innovation, which strategically integrates breakthrough and incremental innovation approaches, is a critical driver of corporate digital transformation by enabling dynamic knowledge recombination and organisational learning. Using panel data from listed companies between 2009 and 2023, the results demonstrate that firms with higher ambidextrous innovation capabilities achieve significantly advanced digital transformation levels. A key theoretical contribution of this study is identifying mitigating managerial myopia, reducing debt financing costs and improving environmental, social and governance performance as synergistic mechanisms through which ambidextrous innovation fosters digital transformation. Furthermore, corporate transparency, investor discernment capability and commercial credit availability are found to positively moderate this relationship. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the effect is more pronounced for non-SOEs, high-growth firms and those operating in more developed regional economies. These findings provide actionable insights for firms seeking to orchestrate knowledge resources in pursuit of digital transformation and offer policymakers guidance for designing innovation incentive systems tailored to diverse organisational contexts.