Chinese enterprises are ushering in a new era of high-end strategic transformation, which is driven not only by China’s high-quality development strategy and consumption upgrading but also by the need for the game between major countries and the restructuring of the global value chain. In the process of high-end strategic transformation, Chinese enterprises face the dual challenges from both internal weakness and external constraints, thus undertaking the dual task of reshaping market cognition externally and realizing the internal transition of organizational strength, which highlights the high risk and difficulty of high-end strategic transformation. Therefore, this paper attempts to analyze the special context of high-end strategic transformation in Chinese enterprises, clarify its connotation, opportunities, and challenges, reveal the practical logic of high-end strategic transformation from a holistic perspective, and advocate the practice-oriented research paradigm and case study method to develop the theory of high-end strategic transformation of Chinese enterprises. This paper aims to clarify the particularity, research boundaries, paradigms, and methods of high-end strategic transformation in businesses and future research directions in this field.

Brand competitiveness is a significant indicator of high-quality development of enterprises and a pivotal factor in an enterprise’s pursuit of long-term growth. Using panel data on Chinese A-share listed companies from 2007 to 2021, this study constructs a measure of brand competitiveness using textual analysis and empirically examines its effect on corporate investment efficiency. The results reveal that brand competitiveness mitigates inefficient investment through two distinct channels: the reputation constraint mechanism and the information acquisition mechanism. These effects are more pronounced in environments characterized by intense market competition, advanced managerial cognition, and sustained brand competitiveness. Additionally, brand competitiveness is shown to significantly enhance total factor productivity, thereby supporting high quality development of enterprises. The findings offer practical implications for enterprises aiming to strengthen brand competitiveness and advance toward high-quality development.

The digital reconstruction of value chain plays an important role in achieving the goal of moving up the value chain in participatory manufacturing enterprises (PMEs). This study aims to investigate the configuration path for the realization of the digital reconstruction performance of value chain in PMEs. Taking 122 PMEs embedded in the Haier COSMOPlat ecosystem as research objects, we change the traditional research perspective and use fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to explore how technology resources, information resources, relationship resources, and digital services provided by industrial internet platform empowerment synergistically affect the digital reconstruction performance of enterprise value chain. This study obtains two groups of high (non-high) performance, namely, product-driven and service-driven; and relationship trapped and information-trapped. The results show that the impact of industrial internet platform empowerment on the digital reconstruction performance of value chain exhibits equifinality across PMEs at different levels and stages of development.

The mechanisms by which value chains are reconfigured during corporate digital transformation have attracted growing attention from both academia and industry. Drawing on technology empowerment theory, we conduct a longitudinal dual-case study of Huawei and Midea to explore the dynamic evolution mechanism of value chain reconfiguration during digital transformation. Specifically, this study aims to find the pathways through which value chain reconfiguration occurs, analyze the mechanisms of value transmission, and examine the similarities and differences in reconfiguration mechanisms between infrastructure-oriented and application-oriented enterprises. The findings reveal that digital technologies serve as the engine and driving force of value chain reconfiguration by empowering resource combinations that integrate data and traditional resources to enhance resource reconfiguration capabilities, innovating resource leverage approaches, and driving value chain reconfiguration. Based on these insights, we develop a research framework of “digital technologies → resource orchestration → value chain reconfiguration.” Furthermore, the mechanism of value chain reconfiguration evolves across three stages, namely, digitalization, networking, and intelligentization. Given their different starting points, motivations, and depths of digitalization, infrastructure oriented and applicationoriented enterprises exhibit distinct mechanisms of value chain reconfiguration at different stages of digital transformation. These findings enrich the understanding of value chain reconfiguration in digital transformation and provide managerial implications for practitioners.

With the advancement of technology, innovation ecosystems based on technological resources gradually emerge. However, little attention has been paid to the internal mechanisms driving the evolution of such ecosystems in extant literature. This study conducts a longitudinal case analysis of iFLYTEK’s ecosystem-building process and finds that the evolution of a technological resource-driven innovation ecosystem comprises three stages: technological accumulation, technological openness, and technological empowerment. Each stage exhibits distinct technological characteristics that underpin different resource orchestration approaches and value co-creation models. In the technological accumulation stage, the company forms an integrated value-creation model by structuring resources. In the technological openness stage, a shared value co creation model is shaped through resource capability development. In the technological empowerment stage, a model emerges via resource leveraging. Based on these findings, this study proposes a theoretical model of the evolution and value co-creation of technological resource-driven innovation ecosystems. This model not only enriches theoretical research on innovation ecosystems and resource orchestration but also provides practical insights for building other technological resource-driven innovation ecosystems.