数字产品进口、知识存量与企业数字创新

数字创新是驱动数字经济增长、实现新旧动能转换的重要引擎，事关数字时代的经济高质量发展与现代化经济体系建设。研究发现：数字产品进口能有效促进我国企业数字技术创新与数字化创新，企业知识存量对这一效应发挥正向调节作用；数字产品进口与知识存量的交互效应在出口企业、本土企业以及高技术产业样本中更为显著；数字产品进口与企业知识存量能协同促进企业采取跨区域合作、跨领域合作等开放式创新模式，进而提高企业数字创新产出。因此，大力发展数字贸易，鼓励企业进口数字产品、引进数字技术，有助于释放数字创新活力并实现创新驱动经济发展。

Imports of Digital Products,Knowledge Stock and Digital Innovation of Enterprises

A new generation of information and communication technologies has reshaped traditional innovation process and gives birth to the so-called digital innovation. By virtue of its strong penetration and wide coverage, digital innovation is bringing subversive efficiency optimization to all trades and professions. In the process of promoting high-quality economic development, digital innovation has become an emerging impetus to realize the transformation of economic growth from factor-driven to innovation-driven. With the support of a patent database, we find empirical evidences revealing the characteristics of China’s digital innovation. Digital patents account for less than 20% of the total applications but are much higher in grant rate compared with non-digital ones. When further comparing two types of digital patents, digital technology patents constitute an overwhelming majority of the digital patents while the proportion of digitized patents is getting higher and higher along with the diffusion of digital technologies. Therefore, it is of great theoretical value and practical significance to fully explore the factors affecting all kinds of digital innovation and disentangle the specific mechanism behind it.This paper examines the impact of imported digital products on digital innovation using a panel of Chinese enterprises over the period of 2000-2014. We present three core results. First, our baseline estimates show that imported digital products can significantly promote two types of digital innovations in enterprises: digital technology innovation and digitized innovation. The conclusion remains robust to a series of tests, including treating imports of digital products as endogenous using the release of the “catalogs of encouraged technology and product imports” in 2007 as a quasi-natural experiment. Second, there is a positive interactive effect between the knowledge stock of enterprises and imported digital products. To be specific, both the depth and breadth of knowledge of enterprises can positively regulate the promotion of imported digital products to digital innovation. In a heterogeneity analysis, the positive and statistically significant interactive effect of knowledge depth and imported digital products is only found at the sample of export enterprises, local enterprises, and high-tech industries, while we detect a generally significant regulating effect of knowledge breadth on all samples other than non-exporting enterprises. Finally, the open innovation model serves as an important channel for imported digital products to affect digital innovation. The imports of digital products and knowledge stock of enterprises can synergistically promote cross-regional and cross-field cooperation, thereby increasing the digital innovation output of enterprises. In terms of policy, this paper proposes to deepen the opening up and cooperation in the field of the digital economy, guide enterprises to absorb and apply cutting-edge digital technologies, so as to fully stimulate the vitality of digital innovation in the whole society.The analysis in this paper contributes to the extant literature in several ways. First, while existing researches have conducted extensive discussions on digital innovation from a theoretical level, there is still a lack of detailed empirical evidence to support the theoretical analysis. This paper extends the analysis by measuring the intensity and describing the trend of digital innovation in Chinese enterprises. Second, we contribute to the literature on the determinants of digital innovation. Few studies have analyzed digital innovation from the perspective of an open economy. We instead make the point that the imports of digital products lead to the increases in digital patents of enterprises. Finally, this paper goes one step further by disentangling the open innovation model channel through which imported digital products and knowledge stock of enterprises affect digital innovation.