| The rise of digital technology has brought profound industrial changes to the global economy and has become a new engine of innovation and economic growth for many countries.As the second largest economy and a major manufacturing country in the world,China is actively using digital technology to empower industrial innovation and transform from "Made in China" to "Created in China".In recent years,the Chinese government has launched a series of initiatives to promote the digital transformation of enterprises,such as "Made in China 2025","Internet+" action plan,"14th Five-Year Plan",and "Digital China" construction plan.With the support and guidance of policies,Chinese enterprises have made remarkable progress in digital applications such as ecommerce and mobile payment,but there are still many gaps with developed countries in cutting-edge digital fields such as artificial intelligence and cloud computing.At present,the primary problem for Chinese companies to achieve technological catchup with developed countries is the lack of top talents in the field of digital and innovation.In this context,academic executives with professional knowledge and management experience are becoming an important force in driving the digital transformation of Chinese enterprises.Therefore,this paper aims to explore the role of academic executives in driving digital transformation and high-quality innovation of Chinese enterprises,and provide management enlightenment for the construction of"Digital China" and the enhancement of the international competitiveness of local enterprises.At the theoretical level,through the review of literature,this paper analyzes the digital empowerment effect of academic executives on corporate innovation and proposes the following three core hypotheses:(1)Executive academic experience enhances the quantity,quality and breakthrough of corporate innovation;(2)Executive academic experience enhances corporate innovation performance by promoting digital transformation,that is,digital transformation plays a mediating role in the relationship between executive academic experience and corporate innovation performance;(3)Board networks and financing constraints play moderating roles in the above relationship.At the empirical level,we selected Chinese A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2019 as research samples to test the above hypotheses.In this paper,we used the percentage of academic executives as the independent variable,combined with crawler and text analysis techniques to construct mediating variables in four dimensions:management attention,media discussion,digital input and digital output,and used social network analysis to construct moderating variables.Further,we used panel regressions as well as Boostrap mediating effects tests to verify the above hypotheses.In order to ensure the reliability of our research conclusions,we also combined instrumental variable method,differential estimation,fixed effect model and propensity score matching analysis to carry out robustness tests.Emprical results indicate that(1)Executive academic experience significantly enhances innovation quantity,innovation quality and breakthrough innovation of firms.(2)Executive academic experience significantly enhances the degree of corporate digital transformation,while digital transformation partially mediates the relationship between executive academic experience and firm innovation performance;(3)Board networks positively moderates the main and mediating effects;and(4)Financing constraints negatively moderate the main and mediating effects.Our findings reveal the digital empowerment effect of academic executives in corporate innovation and enrich the research on academic experience and digital transformation in the Chinese context.Meanwhile,emprical findings of this paper provide references for enterprises to improve the construction of executive teams and enhance innovation performance,and further provide insights for the construction of Digital China and the transformation of"Made in China" to "Created in China". |
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