Digital–intelligent technologies and their extensive application across real-world scenarios are profoundly reshaping traditional industries while fostering emerging and future industries, becoming a key engine for industrial intelligence and the development of new quality productive forces. Advancing new quality productive forces in coal enterprises is a core pathway to overcome bottlenecks such as high safety risks and stringent environmental constraints in the traditional coal sector and to achieve high-quality industrial development; digital–intelligent transformation provides critical support for this process. Using panel data from 30 Chinese A-share listed coal companies from 2012 to 2024, this study empirically examines the impact of digital–intelligent transformation on the development of new quality productive forces in coal enterprises, and explores the mediating role of resource allocation efficiency and the moderating role of local governments’ economic performance assessment pressure. The results show that digital–intelligent transformation significantly promotes the development of new quality productive forces in coal enterprises. Resource allocation efficiency plays a mediating role in this relationship, accounting for 14.89% of the total effect. Moreover, local economic performance assessment pressure negatively moderates the effect of digital–intelligent transformation on the development of new quality productive forces, and this negative moderating effect persists along the mediating pathway via resource allocation efficiency. This study aims to uncover the internal mechanism through which digital–intelligent transformation promotes new quality productive forces in coal enterprises, providing a new theoretical basis and research perspective for coal enterprises to cultivate new quality productive forces.

Under the dual carbon goals, green innovation acts as a key driver for the transformation and upgrading of China’s energy-intensive enterprises, and stands as an inevitable choice to propel China’s shift from a major energy-consuming nation to a powerful scientific and technological nation. To explore the driving mechanism of digital transformation on the green innovation efficiency of energy-intensive enterprises, this paper takes such enterprises from 2011 to 2022 as the research subject, designs three distinct scenarios (environmental protection, enterprise innovation and scientific research innovation), simulates heterogeneous development paths, and forecasts trends to 2030. The results show that green innovation efficiency rises steadily across all scenarios, with the strongest improvement under the scientific research scenario. By 2030, efficiency under this scenario is expected to reach 1.77 times that of the baseline scenario, while the other two scenarios also perform significantly better. These findings confirm the positive role of multi-dimensional policy interventions in strengthening digital-enabled green innovation efficiency. Accordingly, practical recommendations are put forward regarding how digital transformation can effectively drive the improvement of green innovation efficiency of energy-intensive enterprises from the aspects of policy formulation, enterprise management and innovation investment.

Building resilient manufacturing industrial chains while advancing low-carbon transformation is an important issue for sustainable development. This study examines the relationships among configurations of command-and-control, market-incentive, voluntary, and implicit environmental regulation, green technological innovation, and manufacturing industrial chain resilience across 31 provincial-level administrative regions in China. We combine fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis with a complex mediation model. The former identifies environmental regulation configurations associated with high green technological innovation, while the latter examines their relationships with manufacturing industrial chain resilience and the mediating role of green technological innovation. Resilience is measured from the dimensions of entity resilience and structural resilience. The results show that no single type of environmental regulation is necessary for high green technological innovation. Three configurations are identified: the “government–enterprise-driven,” “enterprise–society synergistic,” and “policy–society co-promotion” configurations. Among them, the first two are significantly and positively associated with manufacturing industrial chain resilience, with green technological innovation partially mediating both relationships. When voluntary environmental regulation is a core present condition in both configurations, the mediating role of green technological innovation is more pronounced in the government–enterprise-driven configuration. The findings indicate that coordinating multiple forms of environmental regulation is important for promoting green technological innovation and strengthening manufacturing industrial chain resilience.