How Digital Integration Affects Firms’ Innovation Performance: The Mediating Role Of Value Vo-creation

The leading role of digital economy in China’s national economy has become increasingly prominent in recent years,and accelerating digital development in the future has become an important national strategy for China to proactively respond to and lead a new round of information technology revolution worldwide and to make advance arrangements and timely proposals.Under the digitalization situation,the competitive environment has become more and more complex and changeable,and enterprises have to face many challenges from internal and external sources,prompting them to continuously seek new ways to enhance their sustainable competitive advantages.Innovation performance,as an important indicator to measure the increase of new value of a company,has become an important issue to be addressed in the digital economy to obtain and improve innovation performance.In the digitalization context,more and more companies are leveraging a combination of digital technologies such as big data,cloud computing,artificial intelligence,and 5G to achieve a state of interconnectedness within and across organizational boundaries,i.e.,digital integration,to optimize their own organizational structure,reconfigure their business models,and improve the adaptability of internal elements to the increasingly dynamic and changing external environment in the digital context.However,existing studies have not fully explored whether digital integration can drive innovative behavior and thus improve innovation performance.In addition,as value co-creation is an innovative behavior that creates value efficiently between firms and external agents,it is worthwhile to further explore how digital integration drives and enhances value co-creation between firms and their partners,which in turn affects firms’ innovation performance.Based on the above analysis,this study mainly carries out the following research.On the one hand,the study identifies the important role of digital integration in the context of digital transformation,explores the mechanism of digital integration on innovation performance based on resource-based and transaction cost theories,and analyzes the important role of value cocreation between enterprises and partners based on service-led logic.On the other hand,in the digital online context,companies face more business risks and more heterogeneous demands than in the traditional offline competitive environment.This study further explores the role of the intensity of market competition on the relationship between digital integration and value co-creation from the perspective of the contingency theory.In summary,this research study constructs a basic theoretical model of "digital integrationvalue co-creation-innovation performance" based on theories of transaction costs and the resource base,and proposes a conceptual model and research hypotheses that digital integration has a direct impact on the innovation performance of a firm,with value co-creation as a mediating variable and market competition intensity as a moderating variable.We collected a total of 340 questionnaires and conducted reliability and regression analyses with the help of two data analysis software,SPSS25.0 and AMOS23.0,on the specific data of 340 samples.The final implications of the study and its implications for business management are drawn based on the empirical results.The findings of this paper include the following:(1)digital integration has a significant positive impact on innovation performance;(2)digital integration has a significant positive impact on adaptive value co-creation and guided value co-creation;(3)adaptive value co-creation and guided value co-creation both have a significant positive impact on innovation performance;(4)adaptive value co-creation and guided value co-creation have a partial mediating effect between digital integration and innovation performance,respectively.(4)adaptive value co-creation and guided value co-creation partially mediate the relationship between digital integration and innovation performance;(5)market competition intensity positively moderates the relationship between digital integration and adaptive value co-creation and digital integration and guided value co-creation.The research results enrich and extend the research on the path of enterprise innovation performance improvement in the digital context.It broadens the theoretical vision and application scenarios of enterprise innovation management,and also brings some insights into how to build digital competitiveness and improve innovation performance in the context of digital transformation of companies.