Search results

This paper explains how a variety of business units within a listed corporation have tried to define their strategic capabilities, as part of a process of developing independent business strategies within the corporation's corporate strategy. This paper describes the processes by which strategic capabilities were identified in each unit, the differences and similarities between the capabilities identified at the business unit level, and their consistency (or otherwise) with an overall corporate strategic positioning.

This paper is based on the author's consulting experience with both the parent corporation and its individual business units over a period of 15 years, and most recently on an intensive relationship with one division of the corporation and its 13 business units began three years ago. An objective of these relationships has been clarifying each business unit's strategy and any basis for sustainable competitive advantage of its strategic capabilities. What emerged from this process is a set of definitions of business unit strategic capabilities which are both similar to, but in some cases different from, the corporate parent's perceptions of the strategic capabilities of its business units.

This paper describes the process by which a first representation of “strategic capabilities” emerged in each business unit. For each unit, the agreed descriptions of strategic capabilities helped guide strategic decision making and implementation and assisted each unit in clarifying its strategic positioning in its markets. However, considerable differences remain in the articulation of each unit's capabilities and in what capabilities are considered to exist in the business units.

This paper is designed to give practitioners and academics a case study through which to consider practicalities involved in articulating and operationalizing strategic capabilities in general and in defining corporate strategies in particular.

Firms transforming from a product supplier into a solution provider need to develop entirely new organizational capabilities or re-configure existing ones. This paper aims to conceptualize solution business fitness (SBF) as a construct that captures comprehensively the capabilities necessary for a firm to operate successfully in solution business and investigates how the construct can be measured.

Based on a conceptualization of solution-specific capabilities and SBF, the development of the SBF measurement model followed a three-step procedure: domain specification and conceptual development, qualitative pre-study and quantitative pre-study. The SBF measurement model and its relevance were studied in a large scale longitudinal study using survey data from firm representatives, as well as archival data about the turnover and profitability development of the respective solution providers.

The study empirically validates solution-business-specific capabilities as antecedents of firm performance and shows how different business logics applied by firms give capabilities different importance and impact.

Managerially, firms can use the developed measurement tool to assess their current SBF and define the desired target status. When improving the SBF, managers should pay special attention to the business logic of their firm, as the required capabilities are context-dependent.

The study is the first to conceptualize and measure SBF and to empirically investigate the moderating role of business logic on the importance of the concept and its elements.

This paper aims to identify a manufacturer’s abilities to develop, build, sell and deliver Internet of Things (IoT) services.

This paper is a qualitative comparative case method that uses multiple sources of data, including executive interviews and secondary data, to understand a manufacturer’s IoT capabilities.

Five strategic IoT capabilities were identified: digital business model development, scalable solution platform building, value selling, value delivery and business intelligence and measurement.

The main limitations are related to the qualitative research method applied. The results are applicable mainly to relatively large and global manufacturers.

Managers responsible for solution business development can apply the developed model to acquire and manage IoT specific resources, processes and capabilities.

Existing studies have not addressed the IoT-specific resources, processes and capabilities that manufacturers’ possess. This is one of the first studies to conceptualize how these capabilities are used.

Businesses in Mexico, particularly small and mid-sized companies, are faced with numerous challenges: a lack of competition, difficulty in positioning and maintaining oneself in the market, irrational use of natural resources, and poverty in the environment in which they develop. In spite of these problems, many are able to succeed; however, there is limited knowledge about how these businesses could implement organizational changes that would positively impact their results.

Using dynamic capabilities theory and survey data obtained from pottery businesses in several artisan communities in Mexico through the application of face-to-face interviews, this paper analyzes the relationship between organizational capability for change (OCC) and economic and environmental performance.

This research proves that OCC positively and significantly impacts economic and environmental performance. Results contribute to the existing literature on OCC in the context of poverty.

This study offers empirical research that illustrates the relationship between OCC and the environmental and economic performance of pottery businesses. Additionally it contributes to a field of knowledge in progress; that is, OCC in contexts of subsistence where poverty is a constant issue. Artisans living in this context can also develop business capabilities that contribute to the permanence of their business in the market.

This study aims to advance the understanding of digital marketing capability by conducting a comprehensive, systematic review of relevant literature at the firm level.

The study utilizes categorization and contextualization of qualitative methodologies to review the literature, using Scopus databases to collect 57 journals with 143 peer-reviewed papers as the main focus. The research gaps and DMCs were analyzed and synthesized and presented as collective categorization together with the proposed future direction framework.

This study proposed the relevance of digital marketing capabilities for businesses and the key measurement of business performance. The proposed dimensions of the digital marketing capabilities framework are to identify new research directions for both marketing and IT strands.

This study classify five main different themes in digital marketing incorporating with digital technologies (DTs) era and proposed relevance of digital marketing capabilities for businesses (B2C and B2B) and keys measurement of business performances.

Dynamic capabilities are regarded as the bedrock of businesses that survive in a dynamic environment. Building upon the social capital theory, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the nexus between dynamic capabilities and social capital in family businesses.

The study adopted a quantitative approach. As there is no formal business database available in China, the study followed a snowball sampling procedure. In total, 628 useful responses were gathered.

The study echoes the call of Arregle et al. (2007) for understanding family business’s internal sources of competitiveness and the role of social capital. Results show that the three dimensions of social capital, namely, structural, cognitive, and relational capital, influence dynamic capabilities of family businesses.

The lack of an official business database in China made the conventional representative sample survey used in the West difficult to replicate. Furthermore, empirical data were collected from different regions of China; regional cultures and different levels of economic development across the regions might influence the social capital-dynamic capabilities connection, but these were not examined in the current study.

The study integrates two significant but disconnected research streams, i.e. social capital and dynamic capabilities. Furthermore, the study shows how different dimensions of social capital influence dynamic capabilities. Research findings derived may contribute to the entrepreneurial debate as to why some family businesses can survive in the dynamic environment while others cannot.

This paper aims to present a dynamic model based on casual relationships among the most important effective factors on business–IT alignment in Agile businesses by using system dynamics modeling approach.

To study the most important factors on agility and alignment, the data were collected by questionnaires filled by 201 experts and were analyzed by SPSS and PLS. Casual relationships among studied factors and efficiency coefficients of each factor were identified by fuzzy DEMATEL technique and analyzed by MATLAB and EXCELL. Finally, the dynamic model was plotted by VENSIM.

According to the results, only “learning IT capabilities” are the most important casual factor that has the highest influence on the other factors. “Business responding capabilities” take the highest effect from the system, and “business sensing capabilities” are in the next rank.

This study underpins effective IT deployment toward developing efficient IT capabilities to gain greater agility.

The dynamic capabilities view (DCV) has emerged as an influential theoretical and management framework in modern IS and agility researches. In this regard, we propose a conceptualization of dynamic capabilities in the form of an alignment model. Based on the dynamic capabilities, and on the alignment perspectives found in Henderson and Venkatraman’s seminal model, IT alignment is modeled as a process of reconfiguration of the firm’s IT and organizational resources, competencies and capabilities.

The purpose of this paper is to identify different types of resource and capability configurations among Hungarian family and nonfamily firms and explore which compositions can be considered competitive. In a rivalrous, dynamic world, understanding which sets of resources and capabilities lead to a higher level of competitiveness is vital.

This paper is based on a quantitative competitiveness survey carried out between November 2018 and July 2019 in Hungary. The authors used the Firm Competitiveness Index (FCI) to measure competitiveness and the resource-based view (RBV) approach to understand which configurations of resources and capabilities are responsible for a higher level of competitiveness based on 32 variables. An exploratory factor and cluster analysis were conducted to analyze the ownership's effect on firm competitiveness. The final sample size contained 111 companies, of which 53 were identified as family and 58 as nonfamily firms.

Factor analysis reveals five factors determining resources and capabilities: “operational,” “leadership,” “knowledge management,” “transformation” and “networking.” Based on these factors, the cluster analysis identified five groups in terms of types of family and nonfamily firms: “Lagging capabilities,” “Knowledge-based leadership,” “Innovativeness and transformation-oriented management,” “Relationship-oriented management” and “Business operation-oriented management.” Results show that nonfamily businesses focus on operational and leadership capabilities, reaching a higher FCI than family businesses, which are likely to invest more in their networking, transformation and knowledge management capabilities.

By defining the different configurations family and nonfamily firms rely on to reach competitiveness, the paper applies an essential element to the Hungarian and Middle Eastern European contexts of family business research. The findings contribute to developing family business literature and point out specific resources and capabilities family firms should focus on to shift toward reaching a higher level of professionalization and competitiveness. The characterization of different types of competitiveness comparing family and nonfamily firms enables the firms to assess customized implications.

The aim of this study is to provide a further understanding of how and when social media (SM) boosts firm performance (FP) by exploring the mediation role of business innovation capabilities (BI) and firm competitiveness (FC) in the link between SM and FP.

This study uses a quantitative approach using small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in emerging market as an empirical field of research. The population of this study is the management level of SMEs and professionals. This study surveyed 425 samples to get primary data for quantitative analysis. This study uses Smart PLS SEM version 3.3.2 to analyze the collected data.

This study found that SM directly and indirectly affects FP through BI and FC. Besides, BI and FC mediated the relationship between SM and FP.

The originality of this study lies in the operationalization of an unexplored integrated framework using SMEs in emerging market as an empirical field of research from the perspective of combination of diffusion of innovations theory and resource advantage theory. This study thus provides a new approach to the potential of SM for business innovation capabilities oriented toward sustainability. Drawing on the findings of this study, theoretical and managerial implications are proposed which may be of great interests to business practitioners, business owners, business directors and managers to operate their organizations efficiently through making optimal use of SM platforms.

Organizations invest in novel digital innovations to improve their business processes. These innovations, including Industry 4.0 technologies, enable full organizational integration with business process management (BPM), thereby requiring interorganizational relationship (IOR) capabilities. Many organizations lack knowledge about areas of interorganizational (IO) capability for integrating digital innovations into their value chains. They therefore have difficulty understanding that, as a socio-technical concept, digitalization surpasses the intraorganizational level and requires tools to develop mandatory IOR capabilities. The authors’ systematic literature review (SLR) explores these capabilities within the discipline of BPM. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue.

This SLR follows the standard methodology for structuring a broad research field. The authors assessed capabilities relevant to manufacturing organizations from 58 academic articles published between 2011 and 2021.

Building on existing firm-centric capability frameworks, the authors developed individual capabilities into a novel framework of digital interorganizational value chain (DIOVC). The authors’ conceptual model provides a basis for researchers and practitioners to consider capabilities and the theoretical spectrum of IO value chains.

Future studies should validate these DIOVC capabilities as input for an updated model of BPM maturity aimed at improving business process performance through digital innovations.

This study provides organizations with IOR knowledge, supports decision makers in governing digital innovations and develops IO capabilities to improve their value chain performance.

The authors’ DIOVC capability framework is robust, with constructs and dimensions grounded in the literature, demonstrating theoretical and practical relevance.