The COVID-19 pandemic has remarkably affected the business processes and performance of micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) across the world. MSMEs have had to adopt and implement numerous strategies to sustain their businesses, and their financial and sustainability performance has been impacted by their choice of e-commerce (EC) platforms and digital marketing (DM) strategies. The objective of this research was to explore the effects of EC and DM platforms and strategies on facilitating MSMEs’ financial and sustainability performance amid the devastating COVID-19 pandemic. This study gathered data from 212 MSMEs from three districts of Bangladesh. A partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) approach was undertaken, to test the hypothesized model. The findings revealed that e-commerce had a significant association with MSMEs’ financial performance and sustainability amid the pandemic. It was also observed that digital marketing strategies had a substantial impact on MSMEs’ financial performance. However, the linkage between DM strategies and MSMEs’ sustainability was found to be insignificant. Furthermore, it was found that the financial performance of MSMEs mediated the relationship between e-commerce adoption and their sustainability performance. These findings contribute to the extant technology adoption literature, by exploring the role of e-commerce and digital marketing on firms’ financial outcomes amid a global pandemic. Managers and policymakers of small businesses can learn several things from this study, and understand how crucial digital commerce and digital marketing are to their success and long-term survival.

Emerging digital technologies, with their great advantages in resource convergence, opportunity identification, supply-demand docking and knowledge sharing, are breaking and subverting traditional business concepts and providing a new impetus and opportunities for enterprise innovation activities. Therefore, it is valuable to explore how digital technology affects exploratory innovation to gain a sustainable competitive advantage in a dynamic and changing market environment. Based on data from Chinese A-share high-tech manufacturing listed companies from 2012 to 2020, this paper empirically tests the impact of digital technology on enterprise exploratory innovation by using a fixed effects negative binomial regression model and further explores the intermediate mechanism and boundary conditions between the two. The results show that digital technology has a significant positive impact on enterprise exploratory innovation, and that knowledge breadth plays a mediating role; high network centrality can effectively strengthen the positive impact of digital technology on enterprise knowledge breadth, thus promoting enterprise exploratory innovation. The conclusion enriches and expands the theoretical and empirical research on the driving effect of digital technology innovation, and provides strong practical guidance for encouraging enterprises to achieve exploratory innovation.

A high-quality business environment contributes to unleashing the innovative vitality of market, what kind of business environment can promote the the construction of digital elderly care services is an important issue worthy of attention. Utilizing spatial visualization methods, we unveil distinct regional heterogeneity in the provincial distribution of digital elderly care services. Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta leading the way. To understand this pattern, we engage the fuzzy-set qualitative analysis and examine the configuration of six equivalent pathways for the the business environment on digital elderly care services. In general, we find digital talent aggregation and government public expenditure playing a deterministic role in all configurations and offer recommendations for the innovative development of digital elderly care services under different digital resource endowments.