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The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the successful implementation of digitalization by exploring what characterizes strategy work undertaken by companies that have achieved digital transformation. Based on empirical data, the authors delineate five essential strategic actions that are prerequisites for digital transformation: discuss and communicate the vision and strategy; align resources and activities with the strategy; ensure a continuous focus on operational improvements and efficiency; create an orientation toward customer or user needs and expectations; and develop the competencies of top managers, middle managers and employees.

Between January 2021 and February 2022, the authors conducted a survey on strategy work in Danish organizations with 2,251 respondents. The respondents encompass top managers, middle managers and employees representing 1,164 organizations.

The authors identify five strategic actions that positively influence whether organizations incorporate digitalization into their strategy work. These strategic actions can support organizations in their strategy work regarding digital transformation and offer valuable insights and inspiration for leaders currently undertaking the journey of digital transformation.

Based on the empirical data, it is not possible to deem one action as more important than another in the context of digital transformation, as each action contributes significantly to facilitating the process. Given the nature of empirical data, the strategic actions reflect correlation rather than causation.

The empirical insights provide valuable practical guidance for leaders in managing digital transformation as a part of strategy work, which is typically discussed in a more conceptual manner. In addition, the authors identify new areas for further in-depth exploration in practice.

This study aims to investigate the impact of bureaucratic culture on the formulation and content of digital transformation strategies in Swedish local governments.

This research uses a qualitative content analysis method to examine strategy documents from local governments in Sweden. The analysis is focused on identifying concepts related to the definition of digital transformation strategy, organizational culture and agility. Relevant themes and insights were extracted using concept-driven coding.

The research uncovered a significant influence of bureaucratic culture on the content of strategy documents, which manifests through a strong status quo bias. This bias leads to a cautious approach toward digital innovation, limiting strategies to incremental improvements and maintenance of existing processes.

The findings highlight the need for a nuanced understanding of how organizational culture affects digital transformation. The study suggests avenues for further research, particularly in exploring mechanisms to balance bureaucratic stability with digital agility.

The research proposes recommendations for policymakers and public sector managers, advocating for an approach incorporating cultural awareness to foster a more conducive environment for digital transformation within bureaucratic settings.

This study contributes to the field by revealing the nuanced role of bureaucratic culture in shaping digital transformation strategies within the public sector. It offers a unique insight into the Swedish context.

This study aims to examine the mediating role of innovation capability in the relationship between digital transformation strategy and innovation performance of microfinance institutions in Ethiopia.

Survey data were collected from 12 microfinance institutions in Ethiopia through self-administered questionnaires. Statistical analysis was conducted using structural equation modeling with AMOS and SPSS. Covariance-based structural equation modeling was used to test the study hypotheses.

Digital transformation strategy indicators such as (digitization vision, information technology integration, information technology agility and flexibility of information technology) directly affect innovation performance. The innovation capability mediates the relationship between digital transformation strategy indicator (information technology agility) and innovation performance. However, innovation capability does not have mediation effect in the relationship between digital transformation strategy remaining indicators (digitization vision, information technology flexibility and information technology integration) and innovation performance.

The study affirmed the importance of dynamic capability theory and presents noteworthy conclusions applicable to managers, stakeholders, and policymakers. It illuminates how innovation capability serves as a crucial link between digital transformation strategies and innovation performance within microfinance institutions in Ethiopia. This research enhances the current understanding of innovation capability, digital transformation strategy and innovation performance in the literature.

While previous research has demonstrated the positive effects of digital business strategies on operational efficiency, financial performance and value creation, little is known about how such strategies influence innovation performance. To address the gap, this paper aims to investigate the impact of a firm’s digital business strategy on its innovation performance.

Drawing on the dynamic capability view, this study examines the mechanism through which a digital business strategy affects innovation performance. Data were collected from 215 firms in China and analyzed using multiple regression and structural equation modeling.

The empirical analysis reveals that a firm’s digital business strategy has positive impacts on both product and process innovation performance. These impacts are partially mediated by knowledge-based dynamic capability. Additionally, a firm’s digital business strategy interacts positively with its entrepreneurial orientation in facilitating knowledge-based dynamic capability. Moreover, market turbulence enhances the strength of this interaction effect. Therefore, entrepreneurial-oriented firms operating in turbulent markets can benefit more from digital business strategies to enhance their knowledge-based dynamic capabilities and consequently improve their innovation performance.

This study contributes to the understanding of how a firm’s digital business strategy interacts with entrepreneurial orientation in turbulent markets to shape knowledge-based dynamic capability, which in turn enhances the firm’s innovation performance.

The agricultural supply chain is susceptible to disruptive geopolitical events. Therefore, agri-food firms must devise robust resilience strategies to hasten recovery and mitigate global food security effects. Hence, the central aim of this paper is to investigate how supply chains could leverage digital technologies to design resilience strategies to manage uncertainty stemming from the external environment disrupted by a geopolitical event. The context of the study is the African agri-food supply chain during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The authors employ strategic contingency and dynamic capabilities theory arguments to explore the scenario and conditions under which African agri-food firms could leverage digital technologies to formulate contingency strategies and devise mitigation countermeasures. Then, the authors used a multi-case-study analysis of 14 African firms of different sizes and tiers within three main agri-food sectors (i.e. livestock farming, food-crop and fisheries-aquaculture) to explore, interpret and present data and their findings.

Downstream firms (wholesalers and retailers) of the African agri-food supply chain are found to extensively use digital seizing and transforming capabilities to formulate worst-case assumptions amid geopolitical disruption, followed by proactive mitigation actions. These capabilities are mainly supported by advanced technologies such as blockchain and additive manufacturing. On the other hand, smaller upstream partners (SMEs, cooperatives and smallholders) are found to leverage less advanced technologies, such as mobile apps and cloud-based data analytics, to develop sensing capabilities necessary to formulate a “wait-and-see” strategy, allowing them to reduce perceptions of heightened supply chain uncertainty and take mainly reactive mitigation strategies. Finally, the authors integrate their findings into a conceptual framework that advances the research agenda on managing supply chain uncertainty in vulnerable areas.

This study is the first that sought to understand the contextual conditions (supply chain characteristics and firm characteristics) under which companies in the African agri-food supply chain could leverage digital technologies to manage uncertainty. The study advances contingency and dynamic capability theories by providing a new way of interacting in one specific context. In practice, this study assists managers in developing suitable strategies to manage uncertainty during geopolitical disruptions.

Digital transformation shapes industries and influences the forms of collaboration between companies. This study aims to investigate digital business strategy as a key to facilitating collaboration beyond organizational boundaries.

The study focuses on the connection between digital business strategy and collaboration performance. The authors identify five types of digital business strategy elements based on the literature: development, objectives, resources, management capabilities, and digital leadership. The authors then studied the implications of these elements for collaboration performance using a survey. The study’s empirical data were collected from manufacturing and service companies, and 202 valid responses were received. The implications of the research elements were tested through regression analysis, which included the moderating effects of digitally enabled performance measurement.

The theoretical research framework identifies digital business strategy as a key determinant of collaboration performance, thus advancing the understanding of how companies can utilize digital business strategies and achieve enhanced collaboration performance. The results also show that the effect of digital business strategy on collaboration performance may be moderated by digitally enabled performance management.

The results suggest that management capabilities associated with digital strategy are a crucial element in positively influencing collaboration performance. Further, digital strategy-related resources can be better managed with digitally enabled performance measurement system, which is reflected in improved collaborative performance. Thus, companies should invest in management capabilities and connect their digital business strategies and performance measurement systems to develop collaboration in digital transformation.

The study is among the first to translate an empirical understanding of the digital transformation of small and medium-sized companies into a conceptual framework of a digital business strategy.

This research aims to examine the effects of corporate digital transformation on firm value, with a particular focus on the mediating roles played by cost leadership and differentiation strategies.

This study employs word frequency analysis to create corporate digital transformation indicators and determine how corporate digital transformation impacts firm value. The data used in the analysis comes from 2,056 listed manufacturing enterprises in China between 2010 and 2019.

This study demonstrates that digital transformation has a favorable impact on firm value, and that cost leadership strategy and differentiation strategy significantly mediate the relationship between both of them.

This study utilized word frequency analysis to assess the state of corporate digital transformation. It lacked a more thorough description of internal production processes, operational efficiency, and the pace of digital transformation.

The results of this study can not only promote the digital transformation and firm value, but also provide a theoretical basis for enterprises to choose a reasonable competitive strategy in the digital transformation.

This study contributes significantly to the field of firm value research by including digital transformation as a fundamental component. Furthermore, it investigates how cost leadership strategy and differentiation strategy play mediating roles, providing a new perspective and explanatory mechanism for understanding the influence of digital transformation on firm value.

Organizations deal with digital technologies to achieve their strategic goals. The shift toward digitization is a major challenge because it requires companies to create a digital outlook that influences organizational design. As a result, investigation of institutional theory and entrepreneurial orientation theory in the European food industry has become the focus of research in recent times.

To this end, data were collected from 83 companies related to the food industry in the European context. By applying a hybrid phase of the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and artificial neural network (ANN) methods, this study captured the causal–non-linear relationships among the study constructs.

The findings revealed that the variables of institutional theory and entrepreneurial orientation theory affect the adoption of the digital strategy. There is also a dual interaction role for e-business capabilities and digital transformation. The results of non-linear relationships confirmed that digital strategy adoption is highly influenced by digital transformation, followed by risk-taking, digital leadership, e-business capabilities, organizational agility, proactiveness and innovativeness.

The authors provided significant implications for practitioners and academics about the most influential determinants of digital strategy – businesses must move swiftly toward digitization across its various units to achieve their objectives. An organization’s leadership must realize that equipping the employees with necessary skills is the first step toward digitalization.

The current study underscores the digital strategy, which is usually an overlooked area of investigation, in the food industry. The study identifies some important predictors of digital strategy adoption with the interaction’s role of digital transformation and e-business capabilities. Such relationships have been rarely discussed. In addition, the adoption of a hybrid SEM-AAN approach makes the study an original one.

The dynamic and evolving nature of the market calls for attention to digital platform firms' survival strategies, building agility for persistence in a continuously changing business environment. In India, the government’s adoption of the Digital Policy is one such change in the business environment for the firms that impact almost all sectors. Such policies cause a disruption wherein digital platform firms must be agile and create a strategic response that will endure any changes. The present study attempts to gain insight into the competitive strategies adopted by the digital platform firms of the consumer durables industry in India, which are implemented to facilitate their growth.

The entire study is conducted in two phases. Phase one includes identifying strategies sampled digital platform firms adopted in response to the digitalization policy, and the second phase evaluates the significance of the adopted plans to persist.

While clubbing the 42 strategic responses to a few aggregate dimensions, the study found four types of responses adopted by the digital platform firms in the consumer durable industry to persist in the market. Using a two-step system, the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) approach, the study found that all four dimensions are statistically significant, positively impacting these firms' profitability.

The study contributes to the knowledge base of strategic responses to persist for the incumbent platform firms in a dynamic business environment.

The study answers the pertinent research question of how such strategic decisions may be informed in favor of profitability.

This study aims to focus on a key unanswered question about how digitalization and the knowledge processes it enables affect firms’ strategies in the international arena.

The authors conduct a systematic literature review of relevant theoretical and empirical studies covering over 20 years of research (from 2000 to 2023) and including 73 journal papers.

This review allows us to highlight a relationship between firms’ international strategies and the knowledge processes enabled by applying digital technologies. Specifically, the authors discuss the characteristics of patterns of knowledge flows and knowledge processes (their origin, the type of knowledge they carry on and their directionality) as determinants for the emergence of diverse international strategies embraced by single firms or by populations of firms within ecosystems, networks, global value chains or alliances.

Despite digital technologies constituting important antecedents and critical factors for the internationalization process, and international businesses in general, and operating cross borders implies the enactment of highly knowledge-intensive processes, current literature still fails to provide a holistic picture of how firms strategically use what they know and seek out what they do not know in the international environment, using the affordances of digital technologies.