Abstract:    Digital innovation is an important support for China to implement the innovation-driven development strategy and build a new development pattern. It is an important driving force to promote China′s high-quality economic development and realize industrial digitization and digital industrialization. Although China′s digital innovation has made remarkable achievements in recent years, with the emergence of a number of excellent digital innovation platform enterprises such as Alibaba, JD, Tencent and Haier, it still benefits from the dividend of rapid construction of digital infrastructure, and has not really realized the substantive transformation from "digital empowering" to "digital enabling". The crux of this transformation lies in the mismatch between the digital innovation power and the rapidly developing digital innovation demand. It still depends on the accumulated advantages in the early stage of digital innovation. The degree of radical innovation in pure digital products is low, that is, the digital power problem of digital innovation has not been solved. In order to solve this problem, China needs to focus on the radical innovation of digital workforce tools to provide sufficient digital power for building new advantages of digital economy. In the era of digital economy, the disruptive changes in innovation logic and strategic patterns have put forward higher requirements for the realization of radical innovation of digital workforce tools. The innovation advantage of digital workforce tools benefits from the change of managers′ cognition, which is no longer determined by heterogeneous resources. Although some previous studies have also proposed that managers′ cognition of technology is the crux of enterprises′ rigid bondage and path dependence, and improving managers′ cognition of digital technology can promote the radical innovation of digital workforce tools to a certain extent, the answer to the question of how to promote and when to promote is still in the conceptual framework stage. Therefore, this paper attempts to solve the problem of how technical managers′ cognition enhances enterprises to achieve radical innovation of digital workforce tools.In this paper, based on natural and social attributes of technical managers′ cognition, knowledge field activity and organizational emotional capability were introduced into the relationship between technical managers′ cognition and radical innovation of digital workforce tools, and a research model was constructed with knowledge field activity and organizational emotional capability as multiple mediators, and digital sense-making as moderator. Based on the questionnaire survey of 389 middle and senior managers of digital enabling enterprises, this study used the methods of hierarchical regression analysis, bootstrapping and structural equation model and found that: (1) knowledge field activity and organizational emotional capability play a partial mediating role between the technical managers′ cognition and the radical innovation of digital workforce tools, respectively. (2) In the context of high digital sensemaking, the technical managers′ cognition can affect the radical innovation of digital workforce tools through the knowledge field activity and organizational emotional capability; (3) Digital sensemaking can strengthen the mediation effect of knowledge field activity and organizational emotional capability in the first stage, but this effect is not always effective. Only when digital sensemaking is greater than 2.83 (full score of 5 points), the mediation effect of organizational emotional capability will be more effective. When digital sensemaking is greater than 3.01 (full score of 5 points), the mediation effect of knowledge field activity is more effective.The theoretical contribution of this study is reflected in three aspects: first, this paper focused on digital enabling enterprises, discussed the conditions for the radical innovation of digital workforce tools, promoted the research of digital innovation from enabling innovation to empowering innovation, and expanded the boundary and scope of digital innovation research. Secondly, from the cognitive perspective of technical managers, this paper revealed the realization process of the radical innovation of digital workforce tools by taking the knowledge field activity as the resource-based path and emotional capability as the dynamic capability path. On the one hand, this expanded the acquisition conditions of competitive advantage from the resource and capability basis emphasized in traditional innovation management research to the cognitive basis of managers in digital innovation management research, and expanded the boundary conditions of competitive advantage. On the other hand, the combination of managers′ cognition, emotional capability and knowledge field activity has promoted the development of integration research between different sub domains in the context of digital innovation. Finally, this paper not only deepened the research on digital innovation based on sense-making, expanded the boundary conditions for the radical innovation of digital workforce tool, but also pointed out the direction for the integration research of sense-making and digital innovation, and clarified the functional conditions of digital sense-making in different paths.

Key words:  technical managers′ cognition, digital workforce tool, emotional capability, knowledge field activity, digital sense-making