How Does Digital Technology Synergize Legacy Technology : A Configurational Perspective on Digital Technology Strategy to High-Tech Firm's Technological Innovation

In the context of digitalized markets, the high-tech firm’s technological innovation performing is discouraging because they can’t always leverage the synergies of digital technology with their legacy technologies effectively. Given this situation, we firstly construct four digital technology strategies (reinforcing, scouting, grafting, and integrating) to identify the synergized relationships between digital technology and firm’s legacy technology in a high-tech firm. Then a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis of 168 cases of high-tech manufacturing companies in China uncovers that five configurations are leading to high-tech firm’s high technological innovation performance. Among these configurations, the strategies of reinforcing and scouting are present as the core conditions, and grafting and integrating are contingency factors toward diversified configurations. Moreover, this article scrutinizes the combinations of digital technology strategies are vary regarding firm’s specialized aims (domestic and international) in their innovative practices. These findings complement previous research through shifting the focus from a single effect of digital technology usage toward the holistic view