The Influence of Green Innovation and Digital Transformation on the High-Quality Development of Enterprises: The Mediating Role of ESG Management

As the effects of the global ecological and environmental crisis continue to escalate, nations around the world are compelled to explore new economic development models aimed at mitigating environmental damage. As an important driving force for economic development, green innovation; digital transformation; and environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) have become inevitable choices for pursuing sustainable development in business. Taking Chinese high-tech enterprises as the research object, this study draws on resource-based theory, innovation economics theory, stakeholder theory, and internal organization theory to verify the feasibility of green innovation and digital transformation for enterprises to achieve their goals in high-quality development. Implementing correlation analysis, factorial decomposition, and multiple regression techniques and other methods, hypothesis testing was conducted on the premise of limited questionnaire samples to explore the impact of green innovation and digital transformation on the high-quality development of enterprises and the intermediary effect of ESG management between green innovation, digital transformation, and the high-quality development of enterprises. The results show that green innovation and digital transformation play a crucial role in enhancing the quality of enterprise development; ESG management acts as a partial intermediary in the relationship between green innovation and the high-quality development of enterprises. ESG management serves as a partial intermediary between digital transformation and high-quality development of enterprises. Using the bootstrap method for a robustness test, the conclusion of ESG management mediation is still valid. Based on observation and data, this study provides concrete evidence that ESG management promotes the high-quality development of enterprises and provides practical references for enterprises to form a sustainable development model and government departments to improve ESG management.