A study on the effect of open innovation activities on digital transformation capability and firm performance: evidence from Taiwanese SMEs

This study focuses on whether external knowledge inflow activities under open innovation, including financial knowledge acquisition, non-financial knowledge exploration, and strategic alliances, have a positive impact on firms' execution of digital transformation (DX) and whether firms' execution of DX contributes to firm performance. In addition, we assess whether the knowledge absorption capability of enterprises interferes with their DX capability. In this study, we collected 472 valid samples from Taiwanese small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and we conducted data analysis using SPSS 25.0 and SmartPLS3. The results show that all three types of external knowledge inflow activities have a positive impact on DX implementation, DX can effectively improve the performance of enterprises, and different interference effects occur based on different knowledge inflow activities.