Effect of top management team attention to digital transformation on innovation activities

Digital transformation, as a global trend, has captured a lot of attention from management. How management allocates attention resources has become an important issue if a firm plans to pursue digital transformation. We provide an empirical analysis for this problem from the perspective of the attention-based view. We use data from 493 listed Chinese manufacturing firms from 2012–2020 to examine how the allocation of top management team (TMT) attention to digital transformation affects innovation activities. The results reveal that TMT attention to digital transformation and its intensity has a positive impact on corporate innovation activities, while the breadth of attention exhibits an inverted U-shaped impact on innovation activities. These findings are consistent with theoretical predictions. We also examine the moderating roles of external factors such as market conditions, corporate ownership, CEO duality, and policy support that distract managers’ attention, and reveal different characteristics of moderating role of Chinese state-owned firms. These findings provided a reference for further promoting digital transformation.