As the micro-foundation of macro economy, on the one hand, enterprises are confronted with an increasingly unstable external business environment while also bearing the important task of intelligent manufacturing transformation. This requires enterprises not only to urgently improve the resilience to cope with emergencies, but also to complete the technological transition of intelligent manufacturing. However, the concern of enterprises for their lack of resilience makes them take a wait-and-see attitude towards intelligent manufacturing, which has become an important reason for the stagnation of intelligent manufacturing transformation among Chinese enterprises. Therefore, whether intelligent manufacturing can provide resilience support for enterprises has become the key to solving the dilemma.
Considering that the early-warning, adaptation, and learning abilities repeatedly tempered and continuously accumulated in firms’ daily operations are the fundamental source of their resilience, this paper focuses on the impact of intelligent manufacturing on enterprise resilience and its mechanisms under conventional situations, and carries out an empirical test based on the data of China’s A-share manufacturing listed companies from 2010 to 2019. The findings show that intelligent manufacturing can not only provide resilience support for the implementing firms, but also transmit the resilience-enhancing effect upstream along the supply chains of adopting firms, that is, intelligent manufacturing can also improve the resilience of upstream firms. Mechanism analysis shows that intelligent manufacturing strengthens the resilience level of implementing enterprises by improving their informatization level (information channel), operational efficiency (efficiency channel), and innovation ability (innovation channel), and strengthens their resilience level by encouraging upstream enterprises to increase long-term investment. Furthermore, this paper also explains the asymmetry of the spillover effect of intelligent manufacturing supply chain. The suppression effect of monopoly power among firms is an important factor affecting the supply-chain spillover effects of intelligent manufacturing. When the monopoly power of upstream firms is stronger than, or at least no weaker than, that of adopting firms, the resilience-enhancing effect of intelligent manufacturing is more likely to be reflected in upstream firms. However, the specific spillover effects are also affected by the monopoly power of the implementing enterprises.
The possible marginal contribution of this paper lies in two aspects: First, most literature on resilience limits its analysis perspective to a certain crisis event, which is usually special and scarce, so that the conclusions of such research cannot be fully applied to conventional situations; Second, when the existing literature analyzes the economic benefits brought by intelligent manufacturing for enterprises, it generally limits the analysis perspective to a single implementing enterprise, but ignores that intelligent manufacturing may also affect other enterprises that have close cooperation with the implementing enterprise.
This study enriches the analytical perspective of resilience research and expands the scope of research on the economic benefits of intelligent manufacturing. The relevant conclusions can provide a decision-making basis for the government to strengthen the support of enterprises’ intelligent manufacturing transformation, and provide policy implications for how to amplify the resilience multiplier effect of intelligent manufacturing and improve the diffusion efficiency.
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