Faced with the challenge of sustainable development, all countries globally attach great importance to environmental protection. Due to the traditional mode of economic growth which is characterized by high investment, high consumption, high emission and low benefit, China has become the world’s largest carbon dioxide emitter (Shao et.al,2019). In order to solve the issue of environmental pollution, Chinese government has promoted carbon dioxide peaking and carbon neutrality as a new development philosophy, for example “Working actively and prudently toward the goals of reaching peak carbon emissions and carbon neutrality” and “Pursuing green development and promoting harmony between humanity and nature” (Report to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China). Against this backdrop, it is important and necessary for firms to carry out green innovation activities (Polzin and Sanders, 2020). Many scholars have confirmed the role of green innovation in low-carbon development (Lin and Ma, 2022), it can reduce carbon dioxide emissions (Zhao et al., 2023) and coordinate the nexus between sustainable economic and environmental development (Wang et al., 2019).
In order to achieve its carbon peak and neutrality targets, firms need to transit from a stage of resource dependence to a stage of technology dependence, to which the booming development of digital economy provide good conditions. With the emergence of so called "ABCD" technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Cloud Computing, and Big Data, the digital transformation is gradually becoming an important strategic path for global corporations' technological evolution. Digital transformation can alter business model of enterprises and generate new paths for value creation (Gregory Vial, 2019), promote sustainable development (Yasanur Kayikci, 2018). This represents an important strategic opportunity for companies to promote green innovation through digital transformation.
However, there are few studies on whether digital transformation can enhance green innovation, and the conclusions are not the same. Some research has looked at the impact of digital technology. Digital technologies contribute positively to the innovation (Gaglio et al.,2022). Big data and artificial intelligence can reduce financial and environmental costs, and improve the performance (Singh et al., 2021) and sustainability of industrial enterprises (Andrew Kusiak, 2017). Also, the dynamic capability was promoted (Mikalef et al., 2021) and the competitive advantage was reinforced (Shan et al., 2019) in enterprises with high digitalization. Then, the improvement of dynamic capability can stimulate business model innovation (Ciampi F et al., 2020), and therefore create value for customers (Matarazzo et al., 2020). Especially, the facilitating role of big data analytics in green innovation and environmental performance were also confirmed (Waqas et al., 2021). From a strategic point of view, some research has explored the economic impacts of digital transformation. Digital transformation has significantly improved corporate innovation (Zhai et al., 2022; Zhang et al., 2022.). Many manufacturers have significantly increased their investment in innovation in the process of digital transformation (Wen et al., 2022). Digital transformation also make business more convenient, real-time and scenario-based, optimize the production and operation process (Thomas, 2016), help enterprises achieve energy conservation and emission reduction. Similarly, digital transformation is booming business performance (Peng and Tao, 2022), and reduce stock price crash risk (Wu et al., 2022). What’s more, the initial development of digitalization can enable European countries to transit to the circular economy (Nham Nguyen Thi Hong and Le Thanh Le Ha, 2022). And digital transformation not only improves pollution emission reduction (Xiong et al., 2022), but also can positively affect enterprises’ environmental protection cognition (Xie et al., 2022). To enrich the theoretical and empirical research in this area, this paper focuses on the role of digital transformation in green innovation.
Moreover, prior studies have also shown that executives’ characteristics and competitive environment would affect green innovation (Hojnik and Ruzzier, 2016). Therefore, we also consider the role of internal and external factors when exploring the relationship between digital transformation and green innovation. We further consider two critical factors: executive imprint and media attention. Digital transformation is a kind of strategic decision, so as green innovation, both have technical attributes. Corporate strategic decisions are likely influenced by the characteristics of executives (Akroyd and Kober., 2020; Tian et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2022) such as academic experience (He et al., 2021; Zhao et al., 2022) based on imprinting theory. There exists a lack of system in transition economies compared with developed market economies (Khanna and Palepu, 1997) although informal institutions such as media attention can play an important role in corporate governance (Stelios et al., 2012; Tavakolifar et al., 2021; An et al., 2022). Firstly, as a connecting between enterprises and other stakeholders, media can complete the transmission of information (Gao et al., 2018; Aman et al., 2022). Secondly, with the advent of information era, media is gradually becoming more and more important in shaping social image of firms (Cabral, 2016; Teng and Yang., 2021), which will have an effect on enterprise behavior. As a result, we propose that the relationship between digital transformation and green innovation will be affected by executive experience and media attention.
Therefore, we try to investigate how enterprise digital transformation affects green innovation as well as how executives’ imprint and media attention moderate this relationship, by means of data analysis from 2010–2020 of A-share listed companies in China. Compared to previous literature, our paper makes three major contributions. First, existing studies mainly explore the impact of factors such as green credit, environmental governance, organization capital and economic policy uncertainty on green innovation (Chen et al., 2023; Zhong and Peng, 2022; Qu and Cheung, 2023; Yu and Chen, 2023). We contribute to the research in the field of green innovation based on the perspective of resource and information. We not only extend the literature on the factors that influence green innovation; but also enrich the research on the microeconomic consequences of digital transformation. Secondly, we empirically examining the moderating effects of executives’ technical imprint and media attention on the digital transformation-green innovation relationship. As such, our study indicates that the role of digital transformation in green innovation depends on the internal and external factors of enterprise. Thirdly, we further demonstrate the detailed mechanism by testing mediating effect of dynamic capability. Altogether, the conclusions from this paper may provide novel insights into how to promote green development in China.
The remainder of our paper is as follows. Section 2 represents the theoretical framework and hypotheses. Section 3 shows the research design. Section 4 reports empirical results. Section 5 discusses conclusion.