How Does Digital Marketing Stimulate SMEs'Innova-tion?Based on the Mediating Effect of Information Dy-namic Capabilities
With the deepening implementation of the innova-tion-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 ca-pabilities 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 inno-vation 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 enter-prise 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 urgent-ly need to acquire,playing a significant role in driving their innova-tion processes.In today's volatile,uncertain,complex,and ambigu-ous(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 effec-tively perceive,capture,learn,absorb,and integrate ever-changing information resources to achieve dynamic alignment between digital technology and enterprise development.Information re-sources,as the core element of dynamic capabilities,reconstruct the decision-making foundation of dynamic capabilities,reducing the selection biases caused by insufficient information processing capa-bilities and decision-making experience inertia,thereby optimizing the allocation of enterprise resource elements.Therefore,this pa-per 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 mecha-nisms 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-ity-innovation"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.
Digital MarketingSMEsStrategic InnovationSub-stantive InnovationInformation Dynamic Capabilities
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