The Spillover Effect of Customer Data Assets on Suppliers’ Green Innovation

Green innovation is important for environmental sustainability and long-term ecological balance. Using 1129 observations of Chinese listed firms spanning 2014–2024, combined with text mining method to quantify data assets, this paper empirically examines the impact of customer data assets on suppliers’ green innovation. Our model is integrated with fixed effects for both industry and year. We find that there is a significant improvement in suppliers’ green innovation when customers have more data assets, with a one-notch improvement in the customer data assets of a customer firm. This results in an overall 0.06 increase in supplier green innovation output. Specifically, the spillover effect is more pronounced when there is a shorter geographic distance between suppliers and customers, as well as higher customer concentration. After conducting a variety of endogeneity tests, our results are robust. The mechanism analysis shows that customer data assets facilitate supplier digital transformation and improve supplier operational capacity. The heterogeneity analysis also reveals stronger effects when (1) customers are located in eastern regions, (2) customers belong to technology-intensive industries, (3) suppliers are state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and (4) suppliers face lower financial constraints. Further analysis suggests that customers with more data assets also increase suppliers’ R&D investment and improve green innovation quality. Our research contributes to understanding the spillover effect of customer data assets along the supply chain.