首席信息官、企业领导者与企业数字创新

CIO,CEO and Digital Innovation

数字技术越来越普及,然而数字创新相关研究相对匮乏。基于注意力基础观,探讨企业数字创新前因。以2011—2018年我国上市公司为研究样本,实证研究结果表明:①设置首席信息官(CIO)的企业实施数字创新的可能性更大,数字创新绩效更好;②企业领导者(CEO)的商业关联能够显著提升CIO实施数字创新的可能性及数字创新绩效,CEO的政治关联没有显著调节作用。通过调查CIO和CEO的角色,深化对数字创新前因的理解,推动数字创新理论研究,为企业实施数字创新提供理论依据。

Recently,digital economy has developed rapidly around the world,and digital innovation has become an important driving force for economic development.Various policies were put forward to encourage firms to adopt digital technologies.However,most firms failed to achieve digital transformation and the factors affecting the digital transformation of enterprises are not clear.Digital technology comes with great potential values and risks,and it inevitably captures a growing attention from top management.The top management team(TMT)takes charge of firm strategy,and thus has a direct effect of digital innovation performance.Since every TMT member holds clear responsibilities,it is difficult to provide in-depth and detailed understanding to analyze the impact of TMT on corporate strategy as a whole.Based on the attention basis view(ABV),this paper investigates how the chief information officer(CIO),the top leader of information technology management,and CEO,the most important leader of TMT,influence digital innovation.As the top manager of the information department,CIO is able to support corporate business strategy by developing and implementing information technology strategy.As the most important leader,CEO can influence the effectiveness of other TMT members.Using the sample data of Chinese listed companies from 2011 to 2018 and based on ABV,this paper aims to explore two questions:(1)whether CIO drives firm to adopt digital technology and improves digital innovation performance;(2)how CEOs’business and political connections affect the effectiveness of the CIO.It is found that that firms with CIO are more likely to adopt digital innovation,and the performance of digital innovation is better.CEOs'business connection provides market-related information,helps CEO to obtain the latest digital innovation information,and thus promotes the probability and performance of CIO's digital innovation.However,CEOs'political connection provides policy-related information for making CEOs sensitive to meet government’s requirement,which weakens the probability and performance of CIO implementing digital innovation.The theoretical contributions are as follows.First,from the perspective of IT leadership,it is found that CIO and CEO are the antecedents to promote digital innovation,thus enriching the research on the antecedents of digital innovation.Second,compared with other senior executives,CIO research is relatively rare.This paper advances the CIO research.Third,from a cognitive perspective,CEO's social network affects CIO's willingness and performance in digital innovation,which is helpful to understand the interaction between CIO and CEO in digital innovation.The basic feature of digital innovation lies in the application of digital technology.However,enterprises using digital technology may not develop digital patents.This paper uses 49 specific digital technology keywords to identify digital innovation patents,and deletes the enterprise samples that use digital technology without developing digital patents.In addition,the investment in digital technology is large,and enterprises generally use the digital infrastructure developed by other enterprises or governments.The above fact leads to the inaccuracy of the sample in this paper.Future research should adopt a variety of ways to identify whether enterprises have carried out digital innovation.Moreover,the impact of digital innovation is multifaceted,which may not only reduce the operating cost and improve the operating efficiency,but also increase the sales and profit margin.It is not accurate to use the number of digital innovation patents to measure the performance of digital innovation in this paper.Future research can examine the performance of other aspects.Lastly CSMAR database provides the position information of senior managers of listed enterprises.This paper judges if the enterprise has set CIO through the above data.The existing literature shows that CIO is not always the senior manager of the enterprise,but this paper does not collect the enterprise data that the middle-level manager is the CIO.Future research can investigate the CIO settings of enterprises through various channels,so as to improve the universality of research conclusions.