Abstract: Digital technology innovation is a component of new quality productive force, and exported products quality upgrading is a basic requirement for high-quality openness and development. Focusing on the impact of digital technology innovation on the quality of exported products, this study explores the channels, mechanisms, and obstacles for promoting high-quality development through new quality productive force. Theoretical analysis shows that digital technology innovation reduces resource input and improves resource efficiency, and affects the product quality of incumbent enterprises and critical enterprise; its impact on average product quality presents uncertainty. Empirical analysis finds that digital technology innovation itself does not work well in bettering average product quality, but its cross term with traditional innovation is significantly robust and positive, which tells the necessity of the integration of data and reality, and that of old and new; this effect is not significant for medium and high-tech products, which means that their quality upgrading may rely more on the quality of technological innovation; the above conclusion is still significant after considering factors such as measurement error, sample selection, and endogeneity. It is thus concluded that promoting the integration of digital technology innovation and traditional technology innovation is the key to improving product quality and enhancing high-quality development, and new quality productive force cannot function in isolation from the old productivity.

Key words: new quality productive force, digital technology innovation, integration of old and new, product quality, high-quality development