Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate and understand China’s rural farmers’ financing intention of inclusive finance, and it examines related drivers like knowledge of inclusive finance, perceived benefits and perceived risks of ordering finance. Besides, the social enterprise embeddedness and digital finance are integrated into the conceptual model to further investigate their moderating impact. Design/methodology/approach The authors designed an inclusive finance intention model to examine the relations between dependent variable knowledge of inclusive finance, intermediary variables perceived benefits and perceived risks of ordering finance and the independent variable financing intention of inclusive finance. The embeddedness of social enterprise and digital finance were identified as modifying factors. Both exploratory and conclusive research strategies were applied. A structured questionnaire was developed to collect empirical data from the rural areas of China. Findings It suggests that knowledge of inclusive finance can strengthen both perceived benefits and perceived risk of ordering finance. Interestingly, the embeddness of social enterprise can significantly reduce risk perceptions and improve perceived benefits of ordering finance. Furthermore, perceived benefits of ordering finance can positively enhance rural farmers’ financing intention of inclusive finance, whereas perceived risks can negatively influence the financing intention. Moreover, digital finance as a modifying factor can significantly strengthen the positive correlation between perceived benefits of ordering finance and financing intention of inclusive finance. Practical implications The research indicates that a systematic inclusive finance educational project is needed to enhance rural farmers’ understanding of inclusive finance and its components. Moreover, the study reveals that it is crucial to promote social enterprise participation and digital finance to develop inclusive finance in rural China, as the service attributes of social enterprise and efficiency of digital finance can greatly reduce the existing transaction cost of farmers. Originality/value The conceptual model would potentially contribute to researchers interested in investigating the financing intention of inclusive financial services relating to rural population. The integration of social enterprise embeddedness and digital finance is the uniqueness of this research conceptual model.

PurposeThis paper aims to propose a social enterprise legitimation mechanism by combining the established logic and transformational logic to test the validity of the conceptual model.Design/methodology/approachThe authors construct the theoretical framework based on integrating organizational identity theory, attention-based view and collected 128 social enterprises data during the post-pandemic period in China. The authors applied multiple hierarchical regression analysis and mediation analysis to test the research hypothesis.FindingsThe results show that strong organizational identity contributes significantly to the cognitive legitimacy of social enterprise. Besides, we found that social welfare logic and digital transformation can positively mediate the correlation between organizational identity and cognitive legitimacy.Practical implicationsSocial enterprises enhance legitimacy significantly by social welfare logic comparing with commercial logic, which indicates that social enterprises should allocate more internal resources and attention to present the organization's social value through various distributions. More importantly, social enterprises should embrace digital transformation to enhance transparency and efficiency, decrease transaction costs, enlarge organizational social impact to strengthen cognitive legitimacy.Originality/valueThe paper first proposed and empirically tested that digital transformation is an important mechanism to enhance the social enterprise's cognitive legitimacy.

PurposeIn the hybrid electricity market consisting of renewable and conventional energy, the generation output of renewable power is uncertain because of its intermittency, and the power market demand is also fluctuant. Meanwhile, there is fierce competition among power producers in the power supply market and retailers in the demand market after deregulation, which increases the difficulty of renewable energy power grid-connection. To promote grid-connection of renewable energy power in the hybrid electricity market, the authors construct different contract decision-making models in the “many-to-many” hybrid power supply chain to explore the pricing strategy of renewable energy power grid-connecting.Design/methodology/approachConsidering the dual-uncertainty of renewable energy power output and electricity market demand, the authors construct different decision-making models of wholesale price contract and revenue-sharing contract to compare and optimize grid-connecting pricing, respectively, to maximize the profits of different participants in the hybrid power supply chain. Besides, the authors set different parameters in the models to explore the influence of competition intensity, government subsidies, etc. on power pricing. Then, a numerical simulation is carried out, they verify the existence of the equilibrium solutions satisfying the supply chain coordination, compare the differences of pricing contracts and further analyze the variation characteristics of optimal contract parameters and their interaction relations.FindingsRevenue-sharing contract can increase the quantity of green power grid-connection and realize benefits Pareto improvement of all parties in hybrid power supply chain. The competition intensity both of power supply and demand market will have an impact on the sharing ratio, and the increase of competition intensity results in a reduction of power supply chain coordination pressure. The power contract price, spot price and selling price have all been reduced with the increase of the sharing ratio, and the price of renewable power is more sensitive to the ratio change. The sharing ratio shows a downward trend with the increase of government green power subsidies.Originality/valueOn the basis of expanding the definition of hybrid power market and the theory of newsvendor model, considering the dual-uncertainty of green power generation output and electricity market demand, this paper builds and compares different contract decision-making models to study the grid-connection pricing strategy of renewable energy power. And as an extension of supply chain structure types and management, the authors build a “many-to-many” power supply chain structure model and analyze the impact of competition intensity among power enterprises and the government subsidy on the power grid-connecting pricing.

The Scientific and Technological Innovation Platform (hereafter S&T innovation platform) accumulates rich innovation resources, co-ordinates the interest between multiple innovation subjects, promotes the sharing of innovation resources, and thus enhances the platform’s network innovation capability. Therefore, based on the perspective of the target positioning of the S&T innovation platform, this paper explores the improvement path of the platform’s network innovation capability. Through empirical research, we found that the target positioning of the S&T innovation platform helps to improve the platform’s network innovation capability. The mediating mechanism of construction logic and transformational logic enhances the S&T innovation platform’s network innovation capability. At the same time, this paper studies the influence of boundary factors, such as government guidance and market lead, on the network innovation capability of S&T innovation platforms and finds that the market lead moderating effect impacts the network innovation capability of S&T innovation platforms through commercial logic and transformational logic. The government guidance positively moderates the relationship between the target positioning of the S&T innovation platform and the commercial logic under construction logic. The moderating effect under the joint impact of market lead and government guidance enhances the network innovation capability of the S&T innovation platform using social logic and transformational logic. The novelty and uniqueness of the research are based on the innovation network theory, integrating construction logic and transformational logic, and enriching the boundary conditions to enhance the network innovation capability of the S&T innovation platform by introducing the roles of market lead and government guidance.

PurposeThis paper aims to understand the relationship between the National Innovation Demonstration Zone policy and city innovation capability and the underlying mechanisms.Design/methodology/approach This paper collects panel data of 283 Chinese cities from 2006 to 2018 for the quasi-natural experiment of National Independent Demonstration Zone (NIDZ) policy. It applies the difference-in-difference (DID) method to study the impact of NIDZ policy on city innovation capability and its underlying mechanism to enhance it.FindingsThe empirical result indicates that the establishment of NIDZ significantly enhances the city's innovation capability, which was verified through a series of robustness tests. The mechanism analysis shows that the NIDZ promote the inflow and outflow of knowledge, which implies NIDZ enhances the innovation capability of cities by facilitating the innovation sharing impact. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the higher degree of digitalization, the higher the government service level induce a more favourable policy effect. The policy effect is more significant in the cities with a higher marketization or the eastern developed region.Practical implicationsThis study’s empirical findings suggest that it is essential to improve the digital infrastructure to accomplish the digital transformation and upgrading of NIDZ. The government should improve the service efficiency and reshape the city market environment to ensure the fair competition of science and technology enterprises.Originality/valueThe paper first proposed and empirically tested that innovation sharing is an important mechanism that can significantly enhance the city innovation capability. The authors analyse the heterogeneity of NIDZ from four aspects: digitalization level, marketization level, government service level, and regional development and expanded research boundaries.

The increasing competition in global scientific and technological innovation and the continuous promotion of the “Belt and Road initiatives” have created new opportunities for the improvement in innovation capabilities in the core area of the Silk Road Economic Belt but have also brought new challenges. This paper first starts from the market and government perspective and sorts out the formation mechanism of an innovation network. Subsequently, based on the development practice of the innovation network in the core area of the Silk Road Economic Belt, we applied the grounded theory to reveal the development constraints of the innovation network in the core area and explore the corresponding network governance mechanism. Subsequently, we applied a survey study to test our conceptual model. We empirically found the innovation network structure governance and innovation relation governance impacting mechanism in a market-led and government guidance context. The study found that: first, the market-led environment and government guidance jointly impact the formation of an innovation network. Second, the network structure governance and network relation governance of the innovation network can address the development constraints faced by the current innovation network to a certain extent, thereby improving the firm’s innovation performance. Finally, it is found that both the market-led environment and government guidance play a positive role in regulating the impact of network structure governance and network relation governance on the firm’s innovation performance. The above conclusions expand the application scenarios of innovation network governance theory in underdeveloped areas and, at the same time, provide new theoretical knowledge increments for the formation mechanism of innovation networks and also provide corresponding theoretical guidance for the improvement of the firm’s innovation performance in the core area.