The Structure and Substantive Innovation of Corporate Digital Transformation

Under the circumstances of today’s digital economy, there have been many discrepancies regarding the success of digital transformation within companies. It is hard for firms to choose between slogans and real actions of digital transformation. The research in previous literature tends to use the digital index, which is more general, to assess the innovation effect, without considering the differences inside the structure within the four dimensions of strategic articulation, technological drive, organizational empowerment, and application implementation, which makes it impossible to explore the differential effects of digital transformation. Therefore, in this paper, I employ the sample of A-share listed companies from 2011 to 2023. Under the framework of the logic of digital implementation, the study decomposes digital transformation into four dimensions, namely strategic articulation, technological drive, organizational empowerment, and application implementation, and explores their heterogeneous effects on substantive and strategic innovation. The empirical results show that the degree of digital transformation has a significant positive relationship with substantive innovation but no significant effect on strategic innovation. By dimensions, technological push and application implementation are significantly positively related to substantive innovation, but organizational empowerment does not have a significant effect, and strategic declarations have a minimal marginal negative effect. More importantly, further investigation finds that technological push can contribute to both forms of innovations, while strategic declarations have a significant negative effect on both forms of innovations. On the whole, the benefits of innovation gained through digital transformation is mostly embodied in the improved quality of substantive innovation, while there is a huge gap between the two dimensions. This paper offers an empirical supplement to digital empowerment of innovation at the micro level from the perspective of structural deconstruction.