Green technology innovation is crucial for achieving sustainable development. This paper establishes fixed effect and mediation effect models to study how digital finance influences corporate green technology innovation and the moderating role of financial constraints using the data of Chinese A-share public businesses from 2011 to 2020. The results show that, first, green technology innovation is facilitated by digital finance, and both the coverage breadth and use depth play important roles. Second, digital finance encourages business innovation in green technology by alleviating financial constraints. Third, in state-owned businesses and businesses located in the eastern regions, digital finance has a more visible driving impact on green technology innovation. The aforementioned findings offer insightful research to encourage the balanced growth of digital finance and better enable corporate green technology innovation.

A country’s manufacturing industry is often an important route for national prosperity, but it is also a conduit by which a digital economy may become truly useful. This is so the deep integration of the digital economy and manufacturing industry can enhance independent innovation efficiencies, promote the development of advanced manufacturing clusters, and constantly spawn new models, forms of business, and industries. Consequently, it is crucial to improve China’s global manufacturing value chain. This article starts with an analysis of the development status and competitiveness of the digital economy in China and abroad. It establishes a structural equation and uses the latest data from the World Input-Output and Asian Development Bank databases. It introduces new variables, such as digitization, research and development (R&D) investment, and industrial scale to empirically analyze China’s manufacturing industry’s global value chain (GVC). The results show that the digitization of China’s manufacturing industry can increase the forward participation of GVC in the manufacturing industry to improve the division status of GVCs. Analyses suggest that due to insufficient R&D investment in the division of labor in the GVCs, China’s manufacturing industry is prone to low-end lock-in, inefficient industrial structures, and weak innovation ability. Consequently, the following suggestions are proposed: China’s manufacturing industry needs to accelerate digital transformation, increase R&D investment, actively participate in the division of labor in the GVCs, and enhance core competitiveness.

Digital finance (DF) has provided important financial support for the transformation and upgrading of China’s manufacturing industry. Innovation is the engine of industrial upgrading. To solve the dilemma of developing the manufacturing industry, it is necessary to enhance independent innovation capabilities. On this basis, this article studies the impact of DF on manufacturing technology innovation (MTI). It uses the data of listed manufacturing firms in the Shenzhen and Shanghai A-share markets from 2011 to 2020 to establish a fixed-effects model and a panel-threshold model for empirical analysis. The results revealed that, first, DF significantly accelerates technological innovation in manufacturing enterprises and has a significant positive impact on technological innovation. Secondly, DF drives manufacturing enterprises’ technological innovation by alleviating financial constraints (FCs). Thirdly, there is a dual-threshold effect based on market competition between DF and MTI based on market competition, and the promotion effect of DF on technology innovation decreases with the increasing degree of market competition. Finally, DF better enhances the technological innovation of non-state-owned manufacturing firms in the respective regions compared to state-owned firms. In terms of factor-intensive types, DF is more able to advance the innovative technologies of labor-intensive and capital-intensive enterprises, while it has no significant positive effect on technology-intensive enterprises. Policy implications are suggested to boost manufacturing technology innovation and aid future studies.