From digital product diffusion to sustainable population health: a two-layer complex-network evolutionary game analysis of digital manufacturing and health-oriented sport consumption.

The digital transformation of the sports goods manufacturing industry has become an important pathway for improving the supply capacity of sport and health products and stimulating health-oriented consumption demand. However, existing studies have paid limited attention to the coupled diffusion mechanism between supply-side technological upgrading and demand-side consumer adoption in networked contexts. To address this gap, this study develops a two-stage evolutionary game model on complex networks to analyze the co-evolutionary process between digital innovation technology adoption by sports goods manufacturing firms and consumer adoption of intelligent sport and health products. In the first stage, firms decide whether to adopt digital innovation technologies and engage in collaborative innovation. In the second stage, consumers decide whether to adopt digital sport and health products based on perceived product value and social influence within the consumption network. The results show that: (1) Policy incentives can effectively promote technological transformation among sports goods manufacturing firms and activate the sport and health consumption market. However, government subsidies on the firm side exhibit diminishing marginal effects, suggesting that a reasonable subsidy threshold should be established. (2) High-quality digital sport and health products are the core factor driving sport and health consumption. Improvements in firms' digital capabilities and technology maturity can enhance product health utility, user experience, and market attractiveness. (3) When residents develop strong value recognition and willingness to use digital sport and health products, a more stable mutually reinforcing mechanism can be formed between firms' digital technology adoption and consumer-side diffusion of health-oriented products. Conversely, under low-preference conditions, the supply side and the demand side may fall into a low-level diffusion state. By integrating complex-network evolutionary game analysis with innovation diffusion theory, this study reveals the dynamic collaborative diffusion mechanism of digital sport and health products. The findings extend the analytical framework for studying digital upgrading in sports manufacturing and provide theoretical and practical implications for promoting intelligent transformation and sustainable sport and health consumption.