Digital investment and specialized investment spent by specialized, refined, distinctive, and innovative (SRDI) enterprises are crucial to China’s efforts to build digital competitive advantage and develop new quality productive forces. Drawing on the panel data from 1,421 Chinese SRDI enterprises over the period 2012–2023, this paper clarifies the meaning and measurement indicators of digital competitive advantage and examines how digital investment, specialized investment, and their synergy affect it. The findings show that both digital investment and specialized investment exert an inverted U-shaped effect on digital competitive advantage. Moderate levels of either type of investment can help enterprises gain digital competitive advantage, whereas excessive investment hinders the development of that advantage. The synergy between digital investment and specialized investment, by contrast, promotes the positive growth of enterprises’ digital competitive advantage. Heterogeneity analysis further shows that these effects are more pronounced among SRDI enterprises in eastern China, in highly competitive industries, among high tech enterprises, and among enterprises with a higher degree of digital transformation. This paper enriches competitive advantage theory in the digital context, offers theoretical guidance for the synergistic optimization of digital investment and specialized investment in SRDI enterprises, and identifies a strategic direction for building their digital competitive advantage.

Cost stickiness reflects the corporate resource allocation efficiency, such as capital, labor, and technology. Based on financial data of the listed manufacturing companies over the 2010–2020 period, this paper introduces machine learning methods, uses the word embedding model of machine learning methods to measure the development of intelligent manufacturing at the micro level, and investigates the impact of intelligent manufacturing on corporate cost stickiness and its consequences. The results show that intelligent manufacturing helps to alleviate cost stickiness and that this effect becomes more significant in an enterprise with a strong innovation culture. After replacing the major variables and testing methods, adding control variables for robustness tests, and addressing endogeneity concerns using methods such as fixed effects, instrumental variables, and propensity score matching, the above conclusions still hold. The mechanism testing reveals that technological empowerment and information empowerment are important mechanisms for intelligent manufacturing to alleviate cost stickiness. Heterogeneity tests reveal that the effect of intelligent manufacturing in alleviating corporate cost stickiness is stronger in environments characterized by high economic policy uncertainty and fierce industry competition. Drawing on informal institutional factors, this paper reveals the consequences and process through which intelligent manufacturing improves corporate resource allocation efficiency, providing insights for the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry through intelligent manufacturing.

Internal knowledge search and external knowledge search are important ways to promote digital innovation in specialized, refined, distinctive, and innovative (SRDI) “little giant” enterprises. Nevertheless, further studies regarding how to coordinate the contradictory and complementary relationships between the two need to be done. Based on the organizational ambidexterity theory, this paper examines the mechanism and boundary conditions where knowledge search and its ambidexterity influence digital innovation in SRDI “little giant” enterprises by analyzing the data of the SRDI “little giant” enterprises listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share markets from 2011 to 2023. The results show that there are inverted U-shaped relationships between internal/external knowledge search and digital innovation. The combined dimension of ambidextrous knowledge search has a significant positive impact on digital innovation, and the balanced dimension of ambidextrous knowledge search has an inverted U-shaped relationship with digital innovation. Absorptive capacity positively moderates the relationships between the combined and balanced dimensions of ambidextrous knowledge search and digital innovation. The conclusions provide theoretical support and empirical evidence that encourage “little giant” enterprises to conduct knowledge search for better performance in digital innovation and offer guidance for accelerating the digital transformation of small and medium-sized enterprises.

Using panel data from 186 listed “little giant” enterprises from 2018 to 2022, this paper employs dynamic qualitative comparative analysis to investigate the pathways to high quality development of specialized, refined, distinctive, and innovative small and medium sized enterprises (SRDI SMEs). The findings show that the high-quality development of SRDI SMEs results from the combined effects of focus of attention, situated attention, and structural distribution of attention. Four pathways to high-quality development and four pathways to non-high-quality development are identified. The high-quality development of SRDI SMEs involves an R&D investment trap: Low R&D investment is a core feature of high-quality development pathways, whereas under conditions of attention misalignment or insufficient contextual support, high R&D investment may hinder an enterprise’s ability to achieve high-quality development. Government support is a key condition for promoting the high-quality development of SRDI SMEs. The priority assigned to explorative innovation and exploitative innovation is not fixed; enterprises need to adjust their focus of attention according to their own resources and external environment.