Research On The Differential Impact Of Firms’ Digital Capabilities On Internationalization Performance

In the digital era,more and more companies are using digitization to seek international opportunities,but the attention to this phenomenon in international business literature is still limited.Most of the current studies explain the relationship between corporate digitization and globalization based on a resource-based view.However,the more static view of the resourcebased perspective cannot explain how firms can survive and maintain a sustainable competitive advantage in a rapidly changing international environment.The dynamic capability perspective,which focuses on how firms gain and maintain long-term competitive advantage,is one of the key theoretical perspectives to explain the relationship between digitization and internationalization.Currently,there is a paucity of research on this perspective,and most of it explores short-term performance.At the same time,there are more and more "digital paradoxes" in corporate practice,and the relationship between digital capabilities and internationalization performance cannot be accurately concluded.Based on the above considerations,the core issue of this paper is to investigate the differential impact mechanisms of different dimensions of digital capabilities on internationalization performance in the digital context.To address this core issue,this paper refines the core question into three research questions:(1)What dimensions do firms’ digital capabilities contain,and what are the characteristics of different dimensions?(2)What is the mechanism of differential impact of different dimensions on firms’ internationalization performance?(3)Are there other boundary conditions that affect the relationship between digital capabilities and internationalization performance? In order to address the above research questions,this paper constructs a framework for the influence of digital capabilities on firms’ internationalization strategies under the guidance of dynamic capabilities theory by systematically reviewing the relevant literature on firms’ digital capabilities,dynamic capabilities theory,and firms’ internationalization performance.The paper also incorporates industry digital capabilities and financialization into the research model to investigate the moderating effect of industry digital capabilities and financialization level on the relationship between digital capabilities and internationalization performance of firms.The paper adopts a combination of literature analysis and case study method to address the issue of the division of enterprise digital capabilities dimensions.The research results show that digital capabilities are divided into three dimensions,including digital technology embedding capability,dynamic organizational management capability and business model iteration capability.Digital technology embedding capability represents the degree of technology development and use effect of enterprises,including digital technology perception,digital technology capture and digital technology conversion capability;dynamic organization management capability mainly includes dynamic management capability and dynamic organization capability;business model iteration capability mainly refers to the new value creation mode of enterprises,and the two representative innovation modes are platform mode and service mode.This paper finally takes Chinese A-share listed companies as the research object,retrieves relevant data from 2003 to 2019,uses text mining technology to count the keywords of three dimensions of corporate digital capabilities,and uses OLS regression to test the research hypotheses.The main findings are as follows:(1)the digital technology embedding capability of enterprises enhances the ability of enterprises to perceive,capture and transform opportunities in the international market and thus effectively contributes to the improvement of internationalization performance;the dynamic organizational management capability/business model iteration capability of enterprises contributes to the improvement of internationalization performance in the early development stage.However,with the improvement of these two digital capabilities,the expansion of the international market scope will easily lead to an increase in the cost of enterprise management and model change,which,together with the influence of path dependence,will eventually lead to a decline in internationalization performance.(2)Technology spillover resulting from the enhancement of industry digital capabilities weakens the positive relationship between digital technology embedding capabilities and internationalization performance;however,under the influence of blurred corporate organizational boundaries and increased trend of cross-border integration,the moderating effect of industry digital capabilities on the relationship between dynamic organizational management capabilities/business model iteration capabilities and internationalization performance is not obvious.(3)Financialization of enterprises mainly exerts its "crowding-out effect",which weakens the positive relationship between digital technology embedding capability and internationalization performance of enterprises.The dynamic organizational management capability involves the internal structural transformation and resource flow of the enterprise,and to a certain extent,it does not depend much on capital.Business model turnover capabilities should be mainly influenced by the digital characteristics of financialization.Therefore,the moderating effect of corporate financialization on the relationship between dynamic organizational management capability/business model iteration capability and internationalization performance is not significant.The theoretical contributions and research innovations of this paper are: first,under the guidance of dynamic capabilities perspective,the connotation and dimensional division of enterprise digital capabilities are redefined,contributing to the theoretical expansion of dynamic capabilities theory in the context of digitalization;second,the differentiated effects of different dimensions of enterprise digital capabilities on internationalization performance are distinguished and discussed,and the relationship between enterprise digital capabilities and internationalization performance is analyzed from a long-term perspective,which provides a good basis for the relationship between enterprise digitalization and internationalization performance.Second,we distinguish and explore the differential impact of different dimensions of firms’ digital capabilities on internationalization performance,and analyze the relationship between firms’ digital capabilities and internationalization performance from a long-term perspective,providing new evidence on the relationship between firms’ digitalization and internationalization;Third,we incorporate industry digital capabilities and firms’ financialization into the research framework,further enriching the study of boundary conditions of the relationship between firms’ digital capabilities and internationalization performance.