Abstract: Digital innovation is extremely critical to strengthening corporate competitiveness and driving value chain. Data transactions play an important role in accelerating the high value conversion of data and helping digital innovation breakthroughs. Based on the data of listed companies from 2010 to 2022, this paper used crawler technology, text analysis and manual recognition to identify corporate data transactions, and constructed a dual machine learning model to empirically analyze the impact of data transactions on corporate digital innovation, further expanding the micro-effects and mechanisms of data transactions on digital innovation. The results of the study showed that data transactions have a significant positive impact on corporate digital innovation, and this positive effect is stronger among non-state-owned corporations, large corporations, corporations with high levels of intellectual property protection, and corporations with strong digital infrastructure. The mechanism analysis showed that data transactions have promoted corporate digital innovation through knowledge spillover effect, factor allocation effect, and corporate governance effect. In addition, the effect of the supply-side data transaction, data service transactions, and direct data transactions on promoting corporate digital innovation are more obvious, and data transactions can improve the quality of corporate digital innovation. This study has important implications for encouraging corporates to participate in data transactions, it will expand and strengthen the data factor market, and promote corporate digital innovation through data marketization.

Key words:  data transaction, corporate digital innovation, knowledge spillover effect, resource allocation effect, corporate governance effect