E-Commerce Platforms and Innovation of Manufacturing Enterprises: Exploring Innovation-Driven Pathways for the Deep Integration of the Digital Economy and the Real Economy

Abstract

This paper introduces a theoretical model designed to examine how the presence of manufacturing enterprises on e-commerce platforms impacts their innovation. This paper empirically examines the influence and internal mechanism of manufacturing enterprises’ engagement in e-commerce platforms on their innovation, utilizing extremely detailed micro-level enterprise data from the 1688.com e-commerce platform and the China Patent Database for the period from 2002 to 2019. The main results are: (1) Manufacturing enterprises that use e-commerce platforms are much more likely to come up with new ideas; these results are still statistically significant even after using different robustness tests, such as propensity score matching and instrumental variable- based endogeneity treatment. (2) In terms of the influence mechanism, the presence of manufacturing enterprises on e-commerce platforms primarily stimulates their innovation by expanding the market size and facilitating knowledge spillover. (3) Furthermore, an extended analysis based on the innovation network reveals that participation in e-commerce platforms also significantly improves the patent centrality and the number of star patents for manufacturing enterprises . Therefore, this paper provides valuable insights for exploring the innovation-driven pathways for the deep integration of the digital economy and the real economy.

Keywords

digital economy / e-commerce platform / corporate innovation / knowledge spillover / innovation network

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