关键词: 数字追溯；创新行为；知识整合；环境动态性

Abstract: Innovation is the vitality of the firm development, and whether and how the booming digital technology can lead and even promote innovation behaviors by food firms has attracted extensive attention from academia and practitioners. Drawing on the extended knowledge-based view (KBV), a conceptual model is developed and the impact of an important emerging information technology, digital traceability, on promoting firms’ innovation behaviors (product innovation, process innovation, and management innovation) is explored, examining the mediating role of knowledge integration as well as the moderating effect exerted by environmental dynamism. A questionnaire survey method is used to investigate 305 food firms that have already established a certain foundation in digital traceability in four traceability system construction demonstration areas, including Shangdong, Shanghai, Ningxia, and Fujian in China. Hierarchical regression with moderated mediation test methods is used to verify the impact mechanism and boundary conditions of digital traceability in promoting firms’ innovation behaviors. The empirical results show that: (1) Digital traceability has a significant positive impact on the three innovation behaviors among food firms. Specifically, when food firms implement digital traceability practices, the positive promotion of process innovation is most significant, followed by management and product innovation. (2) Knowledge integration mediates the relationship between digital traceability and innovation behaviors; moreover, digital traceability has partial mediation effects on both process innovation and management innovation while it has a full mediation effect on product innovation. Knowledge integration, as a powerful means of transforming resources into performance, provides the necessary conditions for firm innovation. (3) Environmental dynamism does not play a moderating role in the direct path between digital traceability and innovation behaviors, whereas it plays a moderating role in the first half path (digital traceability-knowledge integration) and the second half path (knowledge integration-process innovation, knowledge integration-management innovation) of the mediation effects. One significant theoretical contribution to the supply chain traceability literature of this study is that it develops a theoretical model, building on the extended KBV, to explore the digital traceability practices-innovation behaviors link by explicating the effects of knowledge integration and environmental dynamism in the food sector. This study highlights the value of digital traceability practices for innovation behaviors and examines the mediating roles of knowledge integration, consequently uncovering the black box of the traceability-innovation relationship. Most importantly, this study also broadens the application of the extended KBV by substantiating the theoretical claim that the linkage between digital traceability practices and innovation behaviors is contingent on environmental dynamism. To sum up, statistical empirical results provide practical implications for food firms on how practitioners identify ways for promoting innovation behaviors through digital traceability practices with the association of knowledge integration strategies in a dynamic environment.

Key words: digital traceability; innovation behavior; knowledge integration; environmental dynamism