Are enterprises embedding in digital platform ecosystems greener? A resource curse view

Achieving the global climate mitigation goals requires corporate green innovation, especially substantive green innovation, to address the resource constraints. In this paper, we analyze the impact of the depth of enterprise embeddedness in digital platform ecosystems (DPEs) on substantive green innovation of enterprises. Previous research findings suggest that enterprises' involvement in DPEs can overcome the resource constraints and increase resource accumulation required for the substantive green innovation of enterprises. However, we suggest that this positive effect may also trigger the resource curse and inhibit substantive green innovation of enterprises. By crawling the word frequencies related to enterprise embedding in the DPE in enterprise annual reports, matching the CSMAR and CNRDS databases, this paper constructs a sample of 15,828 Chinese industrial A-share listed firms from 2010 to 2020, and empirically tests the above theoretical hypotheses by using a quadratic polynomial regression model. We find that there is a significant inverted U-shaped effect of the depth of enterprise embeddedness in DPEs on firms' substantive green innovation, and the optimal depth of embeddedness is 0.66 %. The results of the moderating mechanism test suggest that the family-owned equity of firms weakens, whereas state-owned equity enhances, the inverted U-shaped effect. Our study introduces the resource blessing and resource curse perspectives into the study of DPEs, revealing that moderate depth of enterprise embeddedness in DPEs promotes substantive green innovation of enterprises, whereas excessive depth of embeddedness hinders it.