Digital Transformation and Green Innovation of Chinese Firms: The Moderating Role of Regulatory Pressure and International Opportunities

Jinqiu He and Huiwen Su ()
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Jinqiu He: School of Economics, Central University of Finance and Economics, Beijing 100081, China
Huiwen Su: Renmin Business School, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 20, 1-21

Abstract: The digitalization of business processes has increasingly challenged conventional wisdom in corporate green innovation. This empirical paper studies the timely but theoretically underexplored relationship between digital transformation and green innovation in a developing country context. Given that firms’ digital transformation shifts organizational structures toward decentralization, we employ a digital perspective to analyze organizational coordination, control, and learning mechanisms and propose that digital transformation positively affects corporate green innovation. Moreover, drawing on structural contingency theory, we demonstrate that such effects can be strengthened by external contingencies, specifically regulatory pressure and international opportunities. Using a dataset of Chinese listed firms, we find empirical support for our hypotheses. Our study is one of the first to examine how firms can leverage organizational digital transformation to enhance their green innovation performance and thus provides new insights into the drivers of sustainable practices for firms in developing countries.

Keywords: digital transformation; green innovation; structural contingency theory; regulatory pressure; internationalization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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