The digital economy is a prevailing trend in global development, yet traditional firms still face challenges in digital transformation. Under institutional pressure, firms might imitate the digital strategy of their peers to mitigate these issues; there is still a lack of empirical research to support this. Therefore, this study, drawing on new institutional theory, focuses on investigating whether and how the institutional environment influences companies in embracing digital transformation in the digital economy era. We employ generalized least squares (GLS) regression models on a sample of 2862 non-IT listed firms in China from 2012 to 2020. In addition, we conduct a series of robustness checks. The results show that firms’ mimetic isomorphism of digital transformation is related to the institutional environment. Specifically, both industrial digitalization and regional digitalization promote digital mimetic isomorphism independently; their interaction is positively related to the digital mimetic isomorphism of successful firms but negatively related to similar firms. The results provide empirical evidence for non-IT firms to converge upwards in digital transformation and achieve high-quality development.

Learn from Whom? An Empirical Study of Enterprise Digital Mimetic Isomorphism under the Institutional Environment