Does digitalization improve innovation performance of enterprises?—Evidence from Chinese manufacturing enterprises survey

The deep integration of the new generation of information technology and the real economy provides a new impetus to world economic growth. How manufacturing enterprises, as important microeconomic units, achieve high-quality development through digitalization has drawn much attention from scholars. This article uses the 2012 World Bank survey data of Chinese manufacturing companies to reveal the effect and mechanism of digitalization on innovation performance. This paper suggests that (1) the increasing degree of firms’ digitalization significantly promotes the consumers’ acceptance for corporate innovation; (2) digitalization can bring inclusive contributions to corporate innovation performance; (3) exploitative innovation and exploratory innovation play a partial mediating role in digitalization and innovation performance, while their mechanisms are quite different: The positive mediating effect of exploratory innovation neutralizes the negative suppressing effect of exploitative innovation, and the former one is the main driving force for realizing positive innovation performance. Collectively, these findings provide a theory-based understanding of the impacts of digitalization, while also guiding what executives should expect from the use of rapidly emerging digital technologies.