Abstract: Under the background of the “Digital China” strategy, big data is becoming an important engine for high-quality development of enterprises. The epidemic crisis has accelerated the development process of digitalization, and at the same time, it has also promoted business model innovation to a new strategic height. Existing literatures focus on the driving effect of business model innovation from multiple aspects, but pay little attention to the impact of the big data capability. And researches on the process of SMEs’ big data capability and corporate performance are also very limited. Based on a sample of 209 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), this paper explores the impact of big data capability on SMEs’ business model innovation and performance in the context of environmental dynamics of the epidemic crisis. The results show that SMEs’ big data resource acquisition capability, big data analysis and integration capability and big data application capability can all be conducive to the improvement of their performance. The business model innovation partially plays a mediating role, but the mediating role is not significant in the relationship between big data resource acquisition capability and enterprise performance. The environmental dynamics of the epidemic crisis is not only an important starting condition for big data resource acquisition capability, but also plays a positive moderating role on the relationship between big data integration capability and business model innovation. However, the moderating effect on big data application capability and business model innovation is not significant. The research conclusions have important reference significance for SMEs to cultivate big data capability and carry out business model innovation.

Key words: big data capability, business model innovation, SME performance, environmental dynamics of the epidemic crisis