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1. Introduction
Recently, in major industrial countries, the industry and government have started to advocate for a digital transformation of enterprises and encourage enterprises to use updated information technology to promote management and operation transformations. Digital transformation is believed to improve the way enterprises capture and create value to achieve high-quality development (Bharadwaj et al., 2013; Lucas et al., 2013; Cao et al., 2020). Digitalization not only affects internal elements such as the production and operation process, organizational structure and management concept of enterprises but also goes beyond the boundaries of enterprises and affects R&D cooperation between enterprises or between enterprises and other organizations (universities and scientific research institutions) (Matt et al., 2015). Although internal R&D is an important source of enterprise core competitiveness, it has the characteristics of large investments and long cycles with minimal impact on enterprise innovation performance in a short period. Due to the increasing complexity of technology and R&D activities, the uncertainty level of economic policy is generally on the rise (Wan et al., 2022), and a single enterprise fails to accumulate the resources needed for innovation. Traditional independent R&D innovation has found it difficult to adapt to the market demand for technology-intensive products in a timely manner. R&D cooperation has become an important way to compensate for the shortcomings of internal R&D capacity and to improve the innovation performance of enterprises, and the literature continues to focus primarily on the impact of digitalization on enterprise innovation performance or internal R&D activities. Therefore, under the background of the continuous acceleration of the digitalization process, the influence mechanism of digitalization on the R&D cooperation of enterprises demands and necessitates this discussion.
The existing research uses the qualitative approach to study the impact of digitalization on the R&D cooperation of enterprises primarily from the following two viewpoints. First, digital technology as a means of organizational management has the advantages of information supervision and auditing (Lateef and Omotayo, 2019). The application of digital technology helps improve the information screening ability of enterprises (Goldfarb and Tucker, 2019), reduces partner search and screening costs, reduces information asymmetry among partners, enhances data sharing and alleviates cultural differences and conflicts between enterprises, thus improving the tendency of R&D cooperation and promoting the...