Global Evidence on the Impact of ICT on Innovation Among Knowledge Workers in the Context of Digital Transformation

Under the background of digital transformation, the relationship between knowledge workers and innovation has been widely discussed, but few studies have discussed the relationship between knowledge workers and different types of innovation activities at the macro level. There is also a lack of empirical evidence on the role of ICT. This paper provides an empirical analysis of the relationship between knowledge workers and different national innovation outputs based on the panel data of 122 countries from 2015-2022 and highlights Information and Communication Technology (ICT) as the moderating variable. The results show that first, knowledge workers are significantly positively correlated with total national innovation output, knowledge and technology output, and creative output. Compared with knowledge and technology output, knowledge workers play a stronger role in promoting national creative output. In addition, the utilization rate of ICT, the penetration rate of ICT and government network service all have positive moderating effects on the relationship between knowledge workers and national innovation output. This study is helpful to deepen the understanding of the relationship between innovation individuals and different types of innovation activities, and also validate the importance of ICT for knowledge workers in the era of big data and the Internet of Things.