While digital product innovation offers unprecedented opportunities for incumbent firms to create competitive advantages, its fluid and iterative nature presents distinctive cognitive challenges. There is limited empirical literature explaining the role of constructive cognitive characteristics of executives in differentiating the successful pursuit of digital product innovation. Drawing on upper echelons theory and the attention-based view, we examine how chief executive officer (CEO) cognitive flexibility enables incumbent firms to pursue digital product innovation. Through a mixed-methods approach combining a field survey of 178 machine-building firms and a scenario-based experiment with 134 participants, we demonstrate that CEOs with higher cognitive flexibility achieve superior digital product innovation outcomes by facilitating insightful information acquisition and processing. This relationship is strengthened when CEOs engage in more boundary spanning activities and when firms possess greater social capital. Our study contributes to strategic leadership research by demonstrating how CEO cognitive flexibility enables incumbent firms to navigate the cognitive demands of digital product innovation, while enriching our understanding of how adaptive attention patterns shape strategic adaptation in increasingly digitized environments.

This study investigates how resource-constrained small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) develop and apply digital capabilities across value chain activities for internationalization, addressing a gap in the existing literature. Using six Taiwanese manufacturing SME case studies, and an integrated theoretical lens (Uppsala Internationalization Model, Porter’s Value Chain Framework, and Resource Orchestration Theory), the study explores how digital capabilities embedded in primary and support activities shape internationalization outcomes. Findings show that SMEs prioritize digital investments in primary and downstream activities to enhance foreign market delivery, responsiveness, trust, and visibility. Digital upgrades in support functions primarily enable internal coordination and subsidiary replication. The study identifies three mechanisms – inter-firm value enhancement, inter-firm relationship enhancement, and intra-firm management enhancement – that explain how activity-specific digital capabilities facilitate international expansion. This research offers a detailed understanding of digital capabilities deployment in SMEs and provides practical implications for leaders and policymakers on strategic, phased digital internationalization approaches.

Network ties are crucial sources of organizational learning. Different types of networks, however, embody different types of resources and may relate to exploitative and exploratory learning differently. Drawing on social network theory and organizational learning, we differentiate overseas business and overseas ethnic ties of exporting small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and examine their relationship with exploitative and exploratory learning, respectively. Our results based on survey data of exporting SMEs in China find that overseas business ties are positively related to exploitative learning, whereas overseas ethnic ties are positively related to exploratory learning. Furthermore, slack resources strengthen the positive relationship between overseas ethnic ties and exploratory learning. Our study provides new theoretical and managerial insights for the utilization of business and ethnic ties to achieve exploratory and exploitative learning, particularly in the context of exporting SMEs.

Despite the rapid development of the digital economy, its impact on corporate environmental responsibility remains unclear. Drawing on stakeholder theory, we suggest that city digitalization enhances regulatory and social stakeholder governance and, in turn, facilitates local firms’ corporate environmental investment (CEI). Utilizing data from 2,358 Chinese listed firms operating in environmentally sensitive industries from 2014 through 2019, our findings indicate that city digitalization positively affects CEI. Moreover, such positive impact is more pronounced in regions where environmental regulatory or social salience is high, and for firms with high levels of state share or top management team ownership. Our study sheds light on the governance function of digital development and provides valuable insights into how city digitalization helps address environmental challenges in emerging markets.

This study examines how top managers engage in sensemaking to navigate dynamic and complex industrial policy environments and respond strategically. Based on a longitudinal narrative case study of a privately owned firm in China, we explore how managers interpret evolving policy signals and drive corporate strategic change. We extend sensemaking theory by incorporating an institutional logics perspective to investigate how top managers draw on multiple logics to make sense of policy shifts and craft organizational responses. The study develops a holistic process model that links industrial policy, sensemaking, and strategic change, highlighting the embedded agency of top managers in responding to evolving and diverse institutional pressures. By unpacking the temporal dynamics of sensemaking, we identify how the temporality of sensemaking contributes to heterogeneity in corporate strategic behavior. This research advances understanding of sensemaking as a key process linking shifting policies with firm strategic actions and contributes to the literature on sensemaking, institutional logics, and strategic change.

The rapid advance of the digital era – characterized by big data, artificial intelligence, and platform-based ecosystems – has fundamentally reshaped the landscape for Chinese technology ventures, demanding new approaches to strategic leadership, decision-making processes, and governance. Our special issue on Chinese technology ventures addresses these three distinctive challenges in the digital era. This editorial essay of the special issue first investigates the evolution of the innovation of Chinese firms over the past five decades, highlighting the interplay between technological development and government policy in driving the emergence and growth of Chinese technology ventures. Second, by examining the organizational dynamics shaped by technology and state involvement, this paper identifies how key characteristics of the digital era affect Chinese technology ventures on strategic leadership, decision-making processes, and governance. Finally, this essay introduces the articles in this special issue and proposes avenues for future research that underscore the critical importance of understanding strategic leadership, decision-making, and governance as an integrated system within the evolving digital landscape.

To advance the understanding of how e-government resources drive e-participation, the current research conducts a meta-analysis on the relationship above from the perspective of citizen experience. This meta-analysis synthesizes 517 effect sizes from 126 empirical studies to examine how e-government resources influence citizens’ e-participation intention. The findings highlight several key variables that moderate this effect. Specifically: (1) From the perspective of the experience channel, e-government resources are more effective in facilitating citizen e-participation intention when delivered through social (vs. official) channels. (2) From the perspective of the experience affair, e-government resources exert a stronger impact on citizen e-participation intention when targeting specific (vs. general) public affairs and when focusing on regional (vs. national) government affairs. (3) From the perspective of the experience environment, the effect of e-government resources on e-participation intention is stronger in developing (vs. developed) countries. Based on these findings, this study offers implications for governments and researchers and suggests directions for future research.