Expanding trade in intermediate goods is a crucial pathway to accelerate China’s emergence as a major trading power. Optimizing intermediate goods trade networks not only fully leverages China’s industrial chain advantages, but also is essential for safeguarding industrial chain security and enhancing industrial resilience. How to tap into the potential of intermediate goods trade and enhance the hub position of enterprise trade networks has become an important issue in addressing the low-end lock-in dilemma.

Based on the matched sample data of listed companies and customs data from 2006 to 2016, this paper conducts an in-depth investigation into the relationship between enterprise digital technology innovation capabilities and intermediate goods export network position leapfrogging. The results show that digital technology innovation capabilities significantly promote intermediate goods export network position leapfrogging. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the promoting effect is more pronounced for high-tech enterprises, enterprises with stronger frontier innovation capacity, and enterprises whose export destinations are developed countries (regions) or markets with higher digital proximity. This paper verifies two mechanisms: One is the export advantage reshaping effect, which is mainly achieved through product portfolio adjustment and product structure optimization; the other is the intelligent transformation and digital upgrading effect. Further analysis reveals that favorable internal conditions for strengthening the driving role of digital technology innovation capabilities are technology spillovers from imported digital products, accumulation of top digital talents, and maturity of digital technologies. Establishing and enhancing industry-university-research cooperation represents a favorable external condition to strengthen such a driving effect, and “enterprise-enterprise” and “government-enterprise” innovation cooperation plays a more dominant role than “university-enterprise” innovation cooperation. The policy recommendations include strengthening enterprises’ dominant positions in digital technology innovation, reshaping export advantages with the support of enterprise digital technology capabilities, accelerating enterprises’ intelligent transformation and digital upgrading, and optimizing the internal and external conditions for enterprise digital technology innovation.

This paper makes the following contributions: First, it enriches the theoretical connotations of digital technology innovation and improves the associated measurement methods. Second, it verifies the intrinsic link between enterprise digital technology innovation capabilities and intermediate goods export network position leapfrogging, and systematically identifies two underlying mechanisms, providing a reference pathway for enterprises to achieve a leapfrog in their intermediate goods export network positions. Third, it broadens the analytical scope of favorable internal and external conditions for digital technology innovation capabilities to exert the driving effect, providing empirical evidence for fully unleashing the potential of enterprise digital technology innovation.