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Small‐ to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) are coming under increasing market pressures due to larger more agile companies encroaching on their markets and increasing integration in the supply chain. Thus SMEs need to increase their innovativeness to improve and survive. The aim of this paper is to see how quality practices can be used to instill innovation within SMEs. The research methodology involved a statistical analysis of over 60 SMEs to determine their approach to quality and innovation. This approach was followed up with ten in‐depth case studies to determine deep rich data. The case study data, presented in this paper, show that quality is an essential foundation for progressing to large scale innovation and also continues to act as a catalyst for innovation.

Utilizing the expectation states theory in sociology, this study probes into the influence of the board's informal hierarchy on the quality of enterprise innovation, originating from the perspective of internal directorial interactions, while analyzing the boundary effects exhibited by the nature of property rights and the intensity of geo-culture.

The study selects China's A-share listed companies from 2008 to 2021 as the research sample, employing the Tobit regression analysis method to scrutinize the hypotheses presented in the text.

The regression results demonstrate a positive correlation between the board's informal hierarchy and the enterprise innovation quality (EIQ). Upon introducing variables specific to property rights and geographical culture, the authors found that in comparison to non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs), the influence of the board's informal hierarchy on the quality of corporate innovation is diminished in SOEs. Conversely, the intensity of geo-culture across Chinese provinces enhances their mutual positive influence. In the additional analysis, the authors also found that the elevation of corporate risk tolerance is a significant pathway for the positive effect of the board's informal hierarchy on EIQ. Moreover, this positive influence is more profound in high-tech enterprises, businesses implementing equity incentive plans and companies that have subscribed to director and officer liability insurance.

The findings not only deepen the understanding of how the board's internal status characteristics influence corporate decision-making but also enrich the application scope of expectation states theory. Furthermore, this study offers valuable guidance for optimizing innovation decision-making by adjusting the personnel structures of corporate boards.

Digital transformation and innovation-driven development have become an international consensus. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of relationships, mechanisms and economic consequences between digital transformation and enterprise innovation quality in order to provide a benchmark for developing countries to implement digital transformation strategies and innovation-driven strategies and provide a major support for economic recovery in the post-coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) era.

Using microdata from A-share listed enterprises in Shanghai and Shenzhen from 2010 to 2021, this study examines the relationship between digital transformation and enterprise innovation quality and further reveals the internal logic and economic consequences of digital transformation to improve enterprise innovation quality through the mediating effect and moderating effect models.

The results demonstrate that digital transformation is beneficial for improving enterprise innovation quality. The heterogeneity test demonstrates that digital transformation has a larger effect on improving enterprise innovation quality in non-state-owned enterprises and eastern enterprises in China. The mechanism test demonstrates that digital transformation can improve enterprise innovation quality by improving internal control quality and analyst attention. Furthermore, with the increase in enterprise innovation inputs, digital transformation plays a significantly stronger role in improving enterprise innovation quality. The extended analysis demonstrates that digital transformation can significantly improve enterprise financial performance by improving innovation quality.

First, the construction of the core explanatory variable digital transformation index in this study is based on the Python data analysis software, which calculates the frequency of digital transformation in the text of the business situation analysis portion of the annual report of the listed companies and then obtains the degree of digital transformation of the company in this year. There may be some deviation from the degree of digital transformation in the actual production and operation of enterprises. Second, in addition to internal control quality and analyst attention, are there other mediating mechanisms for the impact of digital transformation on the quality of enterprise innovation? Third, whether the moderating effect of innovation input on digital transformation and innovation quality is related to human capital factors of the research and development (R&D) team, such as the technical background of R&D personnel, etc.

This study enriches the relevant theories of digital transformation and broadens the research boundaries of digital transformation and enterprise innovation. This study's result provides an empirical basis for enterprises to improve enterprise innovation quality and financial performance from the perspective of digital transformation at the micro level and points out specific practical directions, combining theory with practice.

Previous studies have reached inconsistent conclusions on foreign direct investment (FDI) technology spillovers and corporate innovation. The main purpose of this paper is to explore the technological spillover effects of FDI from the microperspective of firm linkages induced by geographic distance. Further analysis is conducted on the impact and mechanism of this spillover on the innovation quality of Chinese enterprises. The conclusions drawn from this paper can guide Chinese enterprises' foreign capital utilization and innovation strategy choices.

Using the data of China's A-share listed companies from 2009 to 2019, this paper explores the role of FDI technology spillover in enterprise innovation quality through a two-way fixed-effect model. The robustness of the results is proven by substituting variables, adding industry fixed effects and excluding high-profit groups, and further using the two-stage least squares (2SLS) method to alleviate the empirical endogeneity problem.

These findings indicate that FDI technology spillover based on geographic proximity has a positive impact on the innovation quality of Chinese enterprises. However, there are different impacts for different types of enterprises. FDI technology spillover has a positive impact on the innovation quality of non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs) and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), while it has no effect on state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and large enterprises. The authors also find that the degree of financing constraints and R&D investment are important transmission mechanisms between FDI technology spillover and enterprise innovation quality.

This study ignores industry characteristics when considering foreign enterprises around Chinese enterprises. In fact, technology spillover effects differ across industries. When the authors matched microdata to regions, only the provincial level was considered. Therefore, there is still room for further research. In future research, the authors should consider industry characteristics and group foreign enterprises and Chinese enterprises in the same industry and in different industries to explore industry differences in technology spillover. In addition, when matching corporate data to regions, the authors can match to the city level and draw city-level conclusions.

This study is different from previous studies that focus on the quantity of enterprise innovation or innovation output. The authors focus on the role of technological spillovers in the quality of Chinese enterprise innovation, enriching research in the field of enterprise innovation quality. In addition, the current FDI technology spillover indicators are technically difficult to measure at the micro level. The authors draw inspiration from the theory of the geographical structure of financial supply and combine the creation methods of macro and micro indicators in existing articles in other fields. The authors ingeniously construct a new FDI technical spillover indicator. This indicator combines the commonly used regional FDI technology spillover with the geographic proximity of enterprises at the microlevel by constructing an interaction term between the two. This indicator not only alleviates the endogeneity problem to a certain extent but also has implications for future research in the field of FDI technology spillovers at the micro level.

(1) FDI technology spillovers are an effective way to improve the innovation quality of local enterprises, especially for non-SOEs and SMEs. Therefore, The authors suggest that in the context of dual circulation, the Chinese government should continue to open wider to the outside world and encourage foreign enterprises to invest in China. (2) In future development, managers of SOEs and large enterprises should create an innovation incentive mechanism. Moreover, they should change their vertical management structure and make full use of their policy advantages and budget advantages to increase innovation activities. In the process of acquiring technology spillovers, enterprises need to solve their own financing constraints.

First, this study solves a technical problem. It is technically difficult to measure the current FDI technical spillover indicators at the micro level. This study innovatively constructs a new FDI technology spillover indicator that combines regional FDI technology spillovers with the microperspective of the geographical proximity of enterprises. This approach not only alleviates certain endogeneity problems in the empirical evidence but also enriches relevant research in the field of technology spillover. In addition, this study focuses on the impact and mechanism of this spillover, which addresses the current research gap among previous studies that mainly focus on innovation quantity and ignore innovation quality.

This study aims to analyze the moderating effect of managerial discretion on the relationship between cross-border knowledge search and the high-tech firms’ innovation quality in a global health emergency and addresses the following issues: the influence mechanism of different types of cross-border knowledge search on the high-tech firms’ innovation quality in a global health emergency; and the moderating role of different dimensions of manager discretion on the above relationship.

Based on the firms’ strategy selection methods, the authors divided cross-border knowledge search into three aspects, namely, breadth, depth and balance, and analyzed the impact of cross-border knowledge search on the innovation quality of high-tech firms in a global health emergency, taking managerial discretion as the moderating variable, and divided it into position rights, pay rights and operation rights according to the key rights of firms’ strategic management. Furthermore, the authors constructed a theoretical model, and for an analysis sample, the authors collected data from Chinese high-tech firms from 2013 to 2021.

The empirical results show that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between cross-border knowledge search breadth, depth and balance and the innovation quality of high-tech firms. The position rights, pay rights and operation rights of managerial discretion have partially significant moderating effects on the relationship between cross-border knowledge search breadth, depth and balance and the high-tech firms’ innovation quality.

Considerable literature has grown around the theme of the impact of knowledge search on the firms’ innovation quality. Nevertheless, only a few studies draw on the combination of global health emergency, cross-border knowledge search and the innovation quality; in particular, no literature has analyzed the relationship between the three from the managerial discretion perspective. Exploring the above relationships has great theoretical value for enriching and improving knowledge management and innovation management theories and provides a theoretical basis and practical support for high-tech firms to face challenges of a global health emergency and to break through the innovation dilemma.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between the four cultural dimensions of the competing values framework (CVF) (group, developmental, hierarchical, and rational cultures) and four types of performance: product quality, process quality, product innovation, and process innovation. Theoretically, this represents the contrasts among the four quadrants of CVF in terms of their respective outcomes, with quality and innovation reflecting the contrast between control and flexibility orientations, and product and process reflecting the contrast between external and internal orientations.

Data were collected from 194 middle and senior managers of Australian firms who had knowledge of past and present organizational practices relating to quality and innovation‐related aspects in the organization.

Developmental culture was found to be the strongest predictor among the four cultural dimensions, as it shows relationships with three of the performance measures: product quality, product innovation, and process innovation. Rational culture shows a relationship with product quality, and along with group and hierarchical cultures, it also plays a role in predicting process quality.

The results provide key insights for managers to appropriately understand the fit between the culture and the strategic direction of the firm. The findings also encourage firms to appreciate the balanced view on what seems to be multiple cultural characteristics within the same organization.

By simultaneously examining the relationships between different cultural dimensions and different types of performance, this paper extends the previous empirical studies which linked CVF with a specific measure of performance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how innovation and entrepreneurial orientation (EO) affect organizational performance on quality in Asian small enterprise context.

Drawing from the strategic management literature, we hypothesize and test the direct and indirect relationship between EO, innovation and quality performance in the context of small information technology (IT) firms in an Asian economy. Data analyses follow standard procedures for testing direct and mediating effects.

Findings indicate a significant direct and indirect positive relationship between EO dimensions and three types of innovation and quality performance. Innovation mediates in the relationship of EO with quality performance.

The paper adds resource-based view and dynamic capabilities theories to extant strategic management literature. Poor representation of women-owned small firms in the study resulting from low participation of females in the IT business sector is a limitation which needs to be addressed in the future, as it hinders a clearer understanding of the perspectives of women business owners.

The paper contributes to managerial practice by underscoring the need for owner-managers of small enterprises to pursue EO-focused and innovation enhancement strategies in an integrated manner.

An integrated model of EO, innovation and performance, tested in small IT service firms in the context of a developing economy. Context does matter. The combination of a developing country context and the significance of IT enhance the contextual contribution of the paper.

Based on the literature on disruptive innovation, this research explores how disruptive innovation directly and indirectly (via innovation speed and innovation quality) influences firm performance in relation to the contingency of market-supporting institutions.

A sample of 207 firms was gathered through questionnaires targeting senior managers and R&D managers from high-tech firms in China with two waves including explanatory variables and outcome variables.

This empirical results indicate that disruptive innovation positively affects firm performance, and that innovation speed and innovation quality mediate the relationship between disruptive innovation and firm performance. Meanwhile, market-supporting institutions positively moderate the relationship between innovation speed and firm performance, but negatively moderate the relationship between innovation quality and firm performance.

This study suggests that disruptive innovation is important to firm performance, innovation speed and innovation quality play mediating roles, and market-supporting institutions acts as moderating effects. A research limitation is that the data were collected mainly through a questionnaire.

Firms should incorporate disruptive innovation as an important strategy and improve innovation speed and innovation quality to promote firm performance, and policymakers should improve the levels of market-supporting institutions to facilitate innovation and performance.

This study contributes the literature of disruptive innovation by uncovering the positive effect of disruptive innovation and firm performance and the mediating effects of innovation speed and innovation quality on the abovementioned relationship, and revealing their contingency effects of market-supporting institutions.

Cumulative capability models are dominating frameworks explaining how manufacturing organizations gain their performance capabilities, such as quality, delivery, flexibility and cost. When innovation capabilities are excluded from the framework, the models are incapable of explaining how companies sustain substantive capabilities in a changing environment. Responding to this gap, the purpose of this paper is to propose and test a “sand cone” cumulative capability model that includes the innovation competitive performance alongside the competitive performance of quality, delivery flexibility and cost.

Two competing cumulative models were proposed. The extended cumulative capability model hypothesizes the development of innovation in sequence with other competitive performance dimensions. The affected with innovation cumulative model hypothesizes innovation performance as a predecessor of other performance dimensions. The models were tested using a multimethod approach on a representative sample of 500 manufacturing companies. An analysis of correlations among competitive performance, frequencies of plants following prescribed sequences, fit statistics of covariance-based structural equation modeling and analysis of strength and statistical significance of path coefficients enabled us to select a model that best represents the collected data.

The findings reveal that innovation competitive performance operates as a predecessor of quality, delivery, flexibility and cost and is developed in relation to these performance dimensions. The modified model also provides a theoretical explanation of how innovation performance helps to sustain reliable production systems that can perform consistently over time within a tolerable range of quality, delivery, flexibility and cost performance.

The results are significant for practitioners, especially for companies that are operating in volatile environments because the results provide insight on how to develop innovation competitive performance in relation to quality, delivery, flexibility and cost performance.

This study extends the cumulative capability models with innovation competitive performance. It advances the contingency approach on cumulative capability models.

The key to the success of multinational corporations’ (MNCs) business models is the improvement of their innovation quality. From the cross-border knowledge management perspective, this paper aims to analyze the improvement path of innovation quality of MNCs and construct the functional path of the relationships among the knowledge creation, knowledge application and innovation quality of MNCs in the cross-border knowledge management process, so as to achieve the success of their business models. Based on this, this paper introduces cultural distance to further analyze how such relationships will change with the cultural distance level.

Using data from Chinese A-share listed MNCs with production operations located in the Asia-Pacific region from 2014 to 2018, this paper constructs a panel data model to test the mediating effect of knowledge application and the moderating effect of cultural distance on such relationships.

This paper obtains the following research findings: knowledge creation and knowledge application each have a significant, inverted U-shaped relationship with innovation quality; knowledge creation has a significantly positive correlation with knowledge application and knowledge application has a partial mediating effect on the relationship between knowledge creation and innovation quality; cultural distance has a moderating effect on such relationships. The specific moderating direction depends on the extent of the knowledge creation and knowledge application.

The findings are helpful to MNCs’ managers, providing guidance and serve as a reference for them to make strategic decisions on cross-board knowledge management and business models innovation.

The theoretical contributions are summarized as follows: First, it further enriches and expands the theoretical of knowledge management and innovation quality relationship. Second, it further enriches and expands the theoretical framework of knowledge management. Third, it further enriches the theoretical framework of cross-cultural management.