Can Intelligent Manufacturing Improve Enterprise Innovation Performance

Abstract

With the rise and development of Industry 4.0, more and more manufacturing enterprises have begun to participate in intelligent transformation, and intelligent manufacturing has gradually become the future production mode of manufacturing enterprises. This research aims to analyze the impact of intelligent manufacturing on innovation performance and explore the contingency effects of R&D investment and the complexity of the organizational structure. Based on the perspective of information processing capabilities, this research believes that intelligent manufacturing can improve the information processing capabilities of enterprises through information collection, information transmission and information utilization, thereby promoting innovation performance. This study finds that to increase R&D investment can enrich the enterprise’s knowledge base, improve the enterprise’s absorptive capacity, and thus better execute the “search-select” cycle when the enterprise’s subunits solve problems, that is to improve the enterprise’s information processing capabilities, which, in turn, strengthen the relationship between intelligent manufacturing and innovation performance. This study also finds that the increase in the complexity of the organizational structure will reduce the enterprise’s ability to respond to environmental changes and the enterprise’s internal coordination capabilities, and therefore increase the difficulty of coordination between the enterprise’s subunits, to weaken the company’s information processing capabilities, which, in turn, weaken the relationship between intelligent manufacturing and innovation performance. This study verifies the positive impact of intelligent manufacturing on innovation performance, the positive moderating effect of R&D investment, and the negative moderating effect of the complexity of the organizational structure through the analysis of 136 corporate sample data. Firstly, this research not only enriches the theory of intelligent manufacturing from the perspective of deep organizational theory and logic, but also extends the “information system strategy” of information processing theory to “intelligent manufacturing strategy”. Secondly, this research not only establishes a theoretical connection between R&D investment and information processing theory, but also expands the mechanism of R&D investment on innovation performance from a contingency perspective. Thirdly, this research establishes a theoretical connection between the complexity of organizational structure and the core concepts of information processing theory to expand the information processing theory. Finally, this research also provides inspiration for the practice of intelligent manufacturing for enterprises.