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Digital technology is crucial to improving a firm’s core competitiveness. However, the existing research on the relationship therein shows heterogeneity. Using digital technology can enhance competitive advantage, which is crucial for enterprises and scholars. Thus, based on the digital technology affordance theory, this study explores the relationship between digital technology affordance and digital competitive advantage.

Survey data were collected from 509 large and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises in China, and multiple regression and structural equation modelling were used to test the hypotheses. Specifically, we discuss the mediating role of digital business capability and the moderating role of organisational legitimacy.

Editability, association and visibility positively affect digital competitive advantage, and their coordination is strong. Further, they can help enterprises gain a competitive advantage through the mediating role of digital business capability (digital strategy, digital integration and regulation). However, the influence effect and action path differ per in different dimensions. Organisational legitimacy positively moderates the mediating effect of digital integration and regulation, and there is a moderated mediating effect. However, the moderating effect on the mediating effect of digital strategy is not significant.

Existing studies neglect the relationship between the coordination of digital technology functions and digital competitive advantage. This study provides a new theoretical explanation for an in-depth understanding of these issues. These findings promote the development of innovation theory and provide valuable insights for guiding the application of digital technology in enterprises.

In the author's experience, even veteran executives often make statements about competitive advantage that reflect either genuine misunderstanding or casual misuse of the term. This paper aims to offer a clear explanation of what constitutes competitive advantage so as to facilitate identification, assessment and strategizing.

The paper proposes a definition of competitive advantage that differs from that proposed by many textbooks. It is based on the idea that competitive advantage can only be defined in terms of customer value.

A number of cases are examined in the light of the customer value approach to identifying competitive advantage.

Company executives learn to periodically engage in systematic information gathering regarding customer‐perceived competitive advantages.

Organizations that adopt this customer‐perceived approach to competitive advantage can make better assessments of where to expend their efforts and resources to outmaneuver their rivals and improve profitability.

The ability of a business to outperform its rivals is known as its competitive edge, and it presents special difficulties in the context of the “digital revolution,” or the fourth industrial revolution. To obtain a competitive edge in the startup operations 4.0 era, this study aims to examine the organizational, technological and competence-related challenges presented by Industry 4.0. It does this by concentrating on the tools, competencies, methods, approaches, tools and strategies that are crucial. Using the Total Interpretive Structural Modeling (TISM) technique, the goal is to find, analyze and classify enablers for startup operations 4.0.

A closed-ended questionnaire and planned interviews were used in the data collection process. In startup operations 4.0, the cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification method is used to rank and categorize competitive advantage factors, whereas the TISM technique is used to analyze how components interact.

The study highlights the critical significance of the “Internet of Things (IoT),” “information technologies,” “technological platforms,” “employee empowerment,” “augmented reality (AR)” and “operational technologies” in its identification of 12 enablers for startup operations 4.0.

The main focus of the study is on the variables that affect startup operations 4.0’s competitive advantage.

Academics and important stakeholders can better understand the factors influencing competitive advantage in startup operations 4.0 with the help of this research.

Large businesses have been profoundly impacted by Industry 4.0 principles; however, startup operations 4.0’s competitive advantage has not received as much attention. This paper offers a fresh take on the concept of competitive advantage in startup operations 4.0 research.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between knowledge-enhancing HR practices, intellectual capital and sustainable competitive advantage in knowledge-based firms.

A quantitative approach was used to conduct the present study. The respondents were sampled from knowledge-based firms in Iran. Overall, 320 managers in 157 firms were selected using convenience sampling. A structural equation model was employed for testing the hypotheses.

The study confirmed that knowledge-enhancing human resource (HR) practices established a very strong connection with intellectual capital. The results further disclosed a positive relationship between intellectual capital and firms' competitive advantage. A mediated relationship between knowledge-enhancing HR practices and firms' competitive advantage through intellectual capital was also affirmed.

The study was conducted in knowledge-based firms in Iran, which limits the generalizability of the research findings. Therefore, future studies should be carried out with samples from other contexts. Moreover, as the study was cross-sectional, the causal relationships could not be inferred directly.

The paper underscored the importance of intellectual capital in improving knowledge-enhancing HR practices and firms' competitive advantage. It suggests to human resource managers to make the organizational arrangements to design knowledge-enhancing HR practices, thereby developing the intellectual capital that brings competitive advantage to knowledge-based firms.

The results of this study contribute to advance research on the intellectual capital literature by trying to explain how intellectual capital as a mediator variable can influence the relationship between knowledge-enhancing HR practices and sustainable competitive advantage.

Our study proposes a resource environment view (REV) of competitive advantage by unpacking the environmental origins of a firm’s competitive advantage. The key tenet of the REV is that the heterogeneity and imperfect mobility of strategic factor markets and institutions across countries explain how firms based in different countries would likely both create and sustain a competitive advantage. In particular, our study introduces the notion of “the paradox of environmental embeddedness.” The paradox lies in the fact that the same environmental conditions – in terms of strategic factor markets and institutions – that enable firms to create a competitive advantage can paradoxically also create a situation in which it is more difficult for these firms to sustain an advantage. Another important aspect of our study is that, to enhance our understanding of how firms manage the paradox of environmental embeddedness, our study specifies the resource environmental conditions under which firms’ internal and external resource-oriented strategies – that is, the development of dynamic capabilities and interventions in the country resource environment – are more beneficial when managing the environmental paradox. Overall, our theorizing has important implications for strategic management theory and practice.

Building on the dynamic resource-based view, this paper suggests that increasing market dynamism and continued resource evolution contribute to the development of temporary competitive advantages utilized in the internationalization of high-technology firms. All competitive advantages needed for internationalization can first be seen as temporary by nature, and it is the outcome of managerial selection and competition, conditioned by the determinants of market dynamism and resource evolution that some resources and advantages may become sustainable. Using a case study approach, this paper suggests that sustainable competitive advantages for internationalization emerge from the temporary advantages through a life cycle as the effects of market dynamism and resource evolution decrease, or their determinants lose relevance in the international markets. The paper aims to contribute to the theoretical discussion concerning the nature and consequences of managing temporary competitive advantages and the internationalization processes.

Part I of this chapter applies the principles of the philosophy of science and the derived scientific method to analyze the foundational concepts and core proposition of the Resource-Base View (RBV) as popularized by Barney (1986, 1991, 1997). This analysis identifies seven fundamental conceptual deficiencies and logic problems in Barney's conceptualization of “strategically valuable resources” and in Barney's VRIO framework for identifying strategically valuable resources that can be sources of sustained competitive advantage. Three problems – the Value Conundrum, the Tautology Problem in the Identification of Resources, and the Absence of a Chain of Causality – relate to the RBV's and VRIO's failure to provide an adequate conceptual basis for identifying strategically valuable resources. The Uniqueness Dilemma, the Cognitive Impossibility Dilemma, and an Asymmetry in Assumptions about Resource Factor Markets result in an inability of the VRIO framework to support identification of resources that can be sources of sustained competitive advantage. More fundamentally, the core proposition of the RBV – that resources that are strategically valuable, rare, inimitable, and organizationally embedded are sources of sustainable competitive advantage – is argued to result directly in the Epistemological Impossibility Problem that precludes use of the scientific method in RBV research. This chapter argues that until these conceptual deficiencies and logic problems are recognized and remedied, the RBV – in spite of its current popularity – is and will remain theoretically sterile and incapable of contributing in any systematic way to the development of strategy theory.

Part II of this chapter then suggests how foundational concepts developed within the competence perspective on strategy provide essential remedies for the identified deficiencies and problems in the RBV – and thereby provide a more conceptually adequate basis for representing the nature of firms in the scientific study of their interactions and competitive outcomes.

This paper aims to derive a model that explores how the interplay between knowledge integration capability and innovation impacts strategic orientation, leading to the attainment of sustainable competitive advantage. The study considers the constituents of strategic orientation, namely, customer orientation, competitor orientation and technology orientation, as the basis for achieving sustainable competitive advantage. The study suggests that the firm’s capacity for integrating external and internal knowledge shapes how strategic orientation influences sustainable competitive advantage through service innovation.

This empirical research relies on qualitative and quantitative data gathered from telecom professionals to assess how knowledge integration and service innovation influence sustained competitive advantage. Structured equation modeling is used to examine the model and its interrelationships.

The research establishes significant relationships between strategic orientations, knowledge integration capability, service innovation and sustainable competitive advantage. Knowledge integration capability and service innovation are found to mediate the relationship between strategic orientations and the achievement of sustainable competitive advantage.

The study highlights the significant contribution of a firm’s knowledge integration capability in driving service innovation, especially in technology-intensive service industries facing hypercompetition. It also advocates prioritizing technology orientation and integrating knowledge from internal and external sources for competitive advantage.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to model the effect of knowledge integration capability and service innovation on strategic orientation-led sustainable competitive advantage.

Decisions about strategies to be implemented and organization design are important in having competitive advantage for companies. Although this statement widely takes place in management literature, very little research has been done on this subject in Turkey. The aim of this study is to examine the mediating role of competitive strategies in the impact of organizational flexibility on competitive advantage in order to extend about empirical literature of the structure-strategy-competitive advantage paradigm based on the resource-based view (RBV). In this context, the data were collected from the top 500 industrial enterprises in Turkey. The data were tested via structural equation model. The findings of our research show that the direct effect of organizational flexibility on competitive superiority was marginally significant and when three different competitive strategies were included between these two variables in the model, the marginally significant effect of organizational flexibility on the competitive advantage disappeared. In other words, the full mediating role of applied competition strategies in the effect of organizational flexibility on competitive advantage has been identified. Our findings are similar to the findings of other studies that consider organizational structure as a valuable resource and examine the relationship between the structure and the strategy according to the RBV.

The strategic management literature emphasizes the concept of business intelligence (BI) as an essential competitive tool. Yet the sustainability of the firms’ competitive advantage provided by BI capability is not well researched. To fill this gap, this study attempts to develop a model for successful BI deployment and empirically examines the association between BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage. Taking the telecommunications industry in Malaysia as a case example, the research particularly focuses on the influencing perceptions held by telecommunications decision makers and executives on factors that impact successful BI deployment. The research further investigates the relationship between successful BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage of the telecommunications organizations. Another important aim of this study is to determine the effect of moderating factors such as organization culture, business strategy, and use of BI tools on BI deployment and the sustainability of firm’s competitive advantage.

This research uses combination of resource-based theory and diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory to examine BI success and its relationship with firm’s sustainability. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and a two-phase sequential mixed method consisting of qualitative and quantitative approaches are employed. A tentative research model is developed first based on extensive literature review. The chapter presents a qualitative field study to fine tune the initial research model. Findings from the qualitative method are also used to develop measures and instruments for the next phase of quantitative method. The study includes a survey study with sample of business analysts and decision makers in telecommunications firms and is analyzed by partial least square-based structural equation modeling.

The findings reveal that some internal resources of the organizations such as BI governance and the perceptions of BI’s characteristics influence the successful deployment of BI. Organizations that practice good BI governance with strong moral and financial support from upper management have an opportunity to realize the dream of having successful BI initiatives in place. The scope of BI governance includes providing sufficient support and commitment in BI funding and implementation, laying out proper BI infrastructure and staffing and establishing a corporate-wide policy and procedures regarding BI. The perceptions about the characteristics of BI such as its relative advantage, complexity, compatibility, and observability are also significant in ensuring BI success. The most important results of this study indicated that with BI successfully deployed, executives would use the knowledge provided for their necessary actions in sustaining the organizations’ competitive advantage in terms of economics, social, and environmental issues.

This study contributes significantly to the existing literature that will assist future BI researchers especially in achieving sustainable competitive advantage. In particular, the model will help practitioners to consider the resources that they are likely to consider when deploying BI. Finally, the applications of this study can be extended through further adaptation in other industries and various geographic contexts.