With its inherent characteristics of decentralization, immutability, and transparency, blockchain technology presents a promising opportunity to revolutionize the South African food supply chains. Blockchain technology, with its decentralized, immutable, and secure nature, offers solutions to these challenges by improving traceability and accountability across the supply chain. This study investigates the role of blockchain technology in enhancing transparency in the food supply chain among small and medium enterprises in South Africa. SMEs form a critical part of the country’s agri-food sector but face challenges such as food fraud, inefficient inventory management, and lack of transparency, which impact food safety and trust. The research adopts a mixed-method approach, utilizing the Technology-Organization-Environment framework and Institutional Theory to explain blockchain adoption among SMEs. The results demonstrate that blockchain-enabled practices, such as smart contracts, records traceability, production tracking, and distribution monitoring, significantly enhance supply chain transparency. The findings highlight blockchain’s potential to increase operational efficiency, regulatory compliance, and stakeholder trust. This research provides valuable insights for policymakers and practitioners, emphasizing the need for regulatory support and strategic investment in blockchain solutions to promote sustainability and competitiveness in the agri-food sector.

In today’s highly competitive environment, enterprises strive for competitive advantages by actively responding to changes in the network environment through digital technology. This approach fosters continuous innovation and establishes new paradigms by creating new network structures and relationships. However, research on the relationship and transmission mechanisms between digital technology and innovation performance in dynamic environments is still in its early stages, which does not fully address the demands of current social practice. Therefore, exploring the impact mechanisms of digital technology applications on enterprise innovation performance is an important research area. Based on the dynamic capability theory, this paper utilized SPSS 26.0 and AMOS 24.0 software to conduct an empirical analysis of 490 valid samples from the network perspective, exploring the pathways through which digital technology capability influences enterprise innovation performance. The results indicate that (1) digital technology capability is positively correlated with enterprise innovation performance; (2) digital technology capability is positively correlated with network responsiveness; (3) network responsiveness is positively correlated with enterprise innovation performance; (4) network responsiveness plays a mediating role in the impact of digital technology capability on enterprise innovation performance; (5) environmental dynamism positively moderates the relationship between digital technology capability and enterprise innovation performance. This paper enhances the understanding of how digital technology capability influences enterprise innovation performance in dynamic environments, offering new insights for future research. The results suggest that enterprises should focus on enhancing their digital technology capabilities, optimizing network structures, and strengthening network relationships to drive digital innovation.

Since the proposal of the low-carbon economy plan, all countries have deeply realized that the economic model of high energy and high emission poses a threat to human life. Therefore, in order to enable the economy to have a longer-term development and comply with international low-carbon policies, enterprises need to speed up the transformation from a high-carbon to a low-carbon economy. Unfortunately, due to the massive volume of data, developing a low-carbon economic enterprise management model might be challenging, and there is no way to get more precise forecast data. This study tackles the challenge of developing a low-carbon enterprise management mode based on the grey digital paradigm, with the aim of finding solutions to these issues. This paper adopts the method of grey digital model, analyzes the strategy of the enterprise to build the model, and makes a comparative experiment on the accuracy and performance of the model in this paper. The results show that the values of MAPE, MSE and MAE of the model in this paper are the lowest. And the r^2 of the model in this paper is also the highest. The MAPE value of the model in this paper is 0.275, the MSE is 0.001, and the MAE is 0.003. These three indicators are much lower than other models, indicating that the model has high prediction accuracy. r² is 0.9997, which is much higher than other models, indicating that the performance of this model is superior. With the support of this model, the efficiency of building an enterprise model has been effectively improved. As a result, developing an enterprise management model for the low-carbon economy based on the gray numerical model can offer businesses new perspectives into how to quicken the shift to the low-carbon economy.