数字营销何以激发中小企业创新——基于信息动态能力的中介作用

How Does Digital Marketing Stimulate SMEs’Innova-tion?Based on the Mediating Effect of Information Dy-namic Capabilities

数字营销作为当今一种主流的营销方式,为中小企业创新活动带来了颠覆性变革。本文选取2011—2020年创业板制造业上市公司为研究样本,首次实证检验了数字营销对中小企业创新的影响效果及内在作用。研究结果表明,数字营销显著激发了中小企业创新,其激励效应主要体现在策略性创新而非实质性创新。依靠Heckman两阶段法、工具变量估计和倾向性得分匹配法等一系列稳健性检验后依然成立。作用机制研究显示,数字营销主要通过提升信息捕捉、信息吸收和信息整合等三维信息动态能力,最终促进中小企业创新。异质性分析表明,在高市场竞争、高博彩文化、非国有和无政治关联的企业中,数字营销的创新激励效果更为明显。本文基于信息动态能力的新视角打开了数字营销赋能企业创新的“黑箱”,为中小企业有效实现数字化转型和创新能力提升的“双赢”提供了一定启示。

With the deepening implementation of the innovation-driven development strategy and the"mass entrepreneurship and innovation"policy,the number of small and medium-sized enterprises(SMEs)in China has exceeded 52 million,displaying the typical characteristics of"56789"and gradually becoming a significant force in enhancing national independent innovation capabilities and promoting industrial upgrading.However,the current innovation of SMEs still relies on policy guidance and government support,characterized by the prominent issues of"waiting,asking,and depending",necessitating the exploration of a replicable innovation enhancement paradigm.At present,digital marketing,which leverages new-generation digital technologies,such as big data and artificial intelligence as a solid foundation,and places consumers at the core,has gradually become an important avenue and a new tool for SMEs to achieve innovative upgrades.Unfortunately,there is a lack of research directly addressing the intrinsic link between the two,and the"black box"of how digital marketing empowers enterprise innovation remains insufficiently explored.The Resource-Based View(RBV)theory posits that a firm's unique competitive advantage stems from its possession of resources that are rare,valuable,inimitable,and non-substitutable.The platform diversity,targeted precision,and deep interactivity exhibited by digital marketing are precisely the key resources that SMEs urgently need to acquire,playing a significant role in driving their innovation processes.In today's volatile,uncertain,complex,and ambiguous(VUCA)market environment,enterprises must leverage digital technology to continually enhance their capabilities to stay in sync with an increasingly turbulent market landscape.At this time,the Dynamic Capability theory compensates for the limitations of the RBV by providing in-depth answers on how enterprises can effectively perceive,capture,learn,absorb,and integrate ever-changing information resources to achieve dynamic alignment between digital technology and enterprise development.Information resources,as the core element of dynamic capabilities,reconstruct the decision-making foundation of dynamic capabilities,reducing the selection biases caused by insufficient information processing capabilities and decision-making experience inertia,thereby optimizing the allocation of enterprise resource elements.Therefore,this paper integrates information resources into the Dynamic Capability theoretical framework and innovatively proposes the new concept of"Information Dynamic Capability,"which is deconstructed into the capabilities of information capture,information absorption,and information integration.The aim is to explore the specific mechanisms by which digital marketing impacts SME innovation under different market scenarios and stages.Based on this,the paper uses listed manufacturing enterprises on the Growth Enterprise Market(GEM)from 2011 to 2020 as a sam-ple to empirically examine the multidimensional impacts of digital marketing on SME innovation from a micro-level perspective of Information Dynamic Capability.The study finds that digital mar-keting significantly promotes SME innovation,primarily inducing strategic innovation rather than substantive innovation.These results remain robust after a series of endogeneity and robustness tests,confirming the innovation-driving effect of digital marketing.Mediating mechanism tests reveal that digital marketing promotes SME innovation by enhancing their three-dimensional information dynamic capabilities:information capture,information absorption,and information integration capabilities.Further analysis shows that the innovation incentive effect of digital marketing is more sig-nificant in external environments with higher market competition intensity and gambling culture,and in internal resources character-ized by non-state ownership and lack of political connections.The contributions of this paper are mainly in three aspects:(1)Re-search perspective:Innovatively incorporating digital marketing into the empirical analysis framework of SME innovation.This pa-per,for the first time,constructs a comprehensive digital marketing index using text analysis methods,systematically analyzing its im-pact mechanisms and economic consequences on SME innovation,providing detailed empirical evidence for the digital transformation and innovation capability enhancement of SMEs.(2)Research theo-ry:Creatively integrating the core element of information resources into the Dynamic Capability theory,proposing the concept of Infor-mation Dynamic Capability,and empirically revealing the intrinsic mechanism of how digital marketing affects SME innovation from the three-dimensional perspectives of information capture,infor-mation absorption,and information integration.This has signifi-cant theoretical value for SMEs in dynamic markets to overcome information resource limitations and realize the"resource-capabil-ityinnovation"transmission path.(3)Research content:Revealing the potential heterogeneity of how digital marketing empowers SME innovation from multiple angles such as market competition,gambling culture,ownership nature,and political connections.This enriches the research boundaries of digital marketing's impact on SME innovation and helps to elucidate the complex relationship between digital marketing and SME innovation,providing practical evidence for SMEs to accelerate the application of digital technolo-gy and achieve a"win-win"of innovation-driven development.