The impact of digital financial inclusion on enterprises’ innovation ability in China empirical evidence from high-tech SMEs

Taking the technology-based SMEs as the research object, the principal component analysis method is utilized to construct the enterprise innovation capability index. The research shows that the development of digital inclusive finance has a significant positive impact on innovation capability, and the positive effect is still significant under the robustness test. However, there is no intermediary effect of financing constraints in the segmented market of small and medium-sized technology-based enterprises, which is partly due to the difficulty of efficient project identification of the digital inclusive platforms with mixed advantages and disadvantages in the market. The lag effect indicates that the impact of digital inclusive finance on the innovation of technology-based SMEs will be more obvious after a period of time.