In the Context of Digital Finance, Can Knowledge Enable Manufacturing Companies to Be More Courageous and Move towards Sustainable Innovation?

Abstract

The advent of the VUCA era and the development of digital finance (DF) present opportunities and challenges for manufacturing companies to seek sustainable innovation by increasing their organizational resilience (OR) to withstand crises. The production, flow, and acquisition of corporate knowledge are indispensable to the establishment of organizational resilience. In this paper, we analyze how to make manufacturing enterprises more courageous and innovative in the context of digital finance. We used a perspective of knowledge channel acquisitions to achieve this aim. Using a sample of 1965 manufacturing companies in China from 2013 to 2020, we analyzed whether greater enterprise knowledge (internal knowledge and external knowledge) can yield higher levels of innovation performance and whether organizational resilience plays a role in the context of digital finance. The results show that (1) both internal enterprise knowledge (IEK) and external enterprise knowledge (EEK) have a significant positive impact on the sustainable innovation performance of manufacturing enterprises; (2) organizational resilience has a mediation role in the process of promoting sustainable innovation performance through enterprise knowledge; (3) digital finance significantly enhances the impact of enterprise knowledge on long-term growth and financial volatility of organizational resilience, and significantly positively moderates the mediation effect of organizational resilience; and (4) digital finance support policies issued by the government significantly improve the sustainable innovation performance of manufacturing firms. Based on these results, manufacturing firms can improve innovation performance by enhancing organizational resilience. This paper contributes to this field of research by providing an analysis of manufacturing firms, presenting a new view on the improvement of innovation performance in the context of digital finance.