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Recent technological turbulence stemming from Industry 4.0 provides managerial opportunities and challenges simultaneously. In this context, the purpose of this study is to explore the role of technological opportunism on innovativeness and discover the impact of innovativeness on new products performance in international markets.

To empirically test the hypotheses, the authors have collected survey data from 237 Korean exporting firms and applied structural equation modeling.

Empirical results indicate that technological opportunism, which represents technology sensing and responding capability, has a positive and significant influence on both exploratory and exploitative innovativeness. Also, explorative and exploitative innovativeness have positive and significant effects on new product performance in international markets.

This study highlighted the importance of technology sensing and responding capabilities to capture emerging opportunities, which may arise from Industry 4.0 technologies. In addition, sensing and responding capabilities will help a firm create a culture that values innovative proclivity, and in turn, will lead to superior new product performance in international markets.

Despite extensive scholarly interest in Industry 4.0, previous studies have neglected to address the potential impact of Industry 4.0 within the domain of new product development and its performance. Also, there have been several calls from the literature to address the managerial and strategic issues surrounding the Industry 4.0 phenomenon. In this study, the authors attempted to fill the research gaps in Industry 4.0 research studies through empirical examination.

In the era of Industry 4.0, international firms are required to respond to more complex and frequent changes in the global market. This study aims to explore the role of organizational agility as a key driver to generate superior performance in international markets in the era of technological transformation and how the degree of such impact is affected by the absorptive capacity of companies.

This research uses the results of a survey targeting 228 Korean exporters to identify the link between organizational agility and business performance in the global market under different degrees of potential and achieved absorptive capacity in the Industry 4.0 era.

The empirical results indicate that companies with a high level of organizational agility outperform their counterparts in the global market. The data further revealed that realized absorptive capacity positively moderates the relationship between organizational agility and firm performance when it is achieved, whereas the moderating role of potential absorptive capacity is not significant.

This research contributes to the advancement of international business studies on organizational agility and Industry 4.0 by highlighting the implication of organizational agility on firm performance and the contingent role of absorptive capacity.