The rapid expansion of the digital economy is profoundly reshaping the global economic landscape, and international competition around digital technologies is becoming increasingly intense. Despite China’s remarkable progress in the digital economy, its core technologies still face “bottleneck” constraints, highlighting the urgent need to identify the key drivers of digital technology innovation. Existing studies generally acknowledge the important roles of both free exploration by firms and organized scientific research by the government in the innovation process, yet few have examined the impact of firms’ exploratory innovation strategy on digital technology innovation, and the potential synergistic effects between such a strategy and government digital policies remain underexplored. Based on data from China’s A-share listed companies, this paper investigates the impact of firms’ exploratory innovation strategy on digital technology innovation and analyzes the heterogeneous moderating effects of government digital policies. The findings reveal that implementing an exploratory innovation strategy significantly promotes corporate digital technology innovation and enhances the quality of such innovation, thereby helping China overcome the “bottleneck” constraints in digital technologies. Government policies on digital talent and data empowerment can strengthen the promoting effect of exploratory innovation strategy on digital technology innovation, whereas the moderating effect of digital subsidy policies is not significant. Mechanism analysis indicates that the exploratory innovation strategy facilitates digital technology innovation by horizontally expanding innovation networks, vertically intensifying innovation efforts, and transforming corporate innovation paradigms. Heterogeneity analysis shows that exploratory innovation strategy promotes digital technology innovation only in non-labor-intensive firms, large-scale firms, and firms in growth and maturity stages. The conclusions of this study contribute to understanding the synergy and boundaries between autonomous exploration and organized scientific research, offering valuable insights for designing policies that foster innovation through the coordinated interaction of market-based exploration and government guidance. The contributions of this paper are threefold. First, while prior literature has primarily examined the effects of exploratory innovation strategies on general innovation outcomes, this paper systematically analyzes the impact of the exploratory innovation strategy on corporate digital technology innovation, thereby extending the literature on the economic consequences of exploratory innovation strategy and enriching research on the drivers of digital technology innovation. Second, by elucidating the mechanisms through which exploratory innovation strategy promotes digital technology innovation from three dimensions—horizontal expansion of innovation networks, vertical intensification of innovation efforts, and transformation of innovation paradigms—this study not only deepens the understanding of how corporate innovation strategies translate into digital innovation outcomes but also offers theoretical guidance for firms in making digital innovation decisions. Finally, this paper reveals the synergistic effects and differential impacts of corporate exploratory innovation and government digital policies, offering important implications for the government to optimize the digital innovation policy system and build an innovation ecosystem jointly driven by firms’ autonomous exploration and government-organized research.