CONCRETISING THE HAZY LINK BETWEEN DIGITAL BUSINESS MODELS AND DYNAMIC CAPABILITY IN THE AGE OF INDUSTRY 4.0: A RESEARCH AGENDA

Year 2020, Proceedings of The Third Economics, Business And Organization Research (EBOR) Conference, 50 - 58, 31.12.2020

Berk Küçükaltan

Abstract

Following three industrial revolutions, today, we have been experiencing the fourth industrial revolution, widely known as “Industry 4.0”. In the age of Industry 4.0, digitalisation is of great importance since it fundamentally sparks off incorporating different technologies and transforms traditional business models into digital business models. In this shift, among various approaches, adopting the dynamic capability principles is especially critical for organisations due to its inherent nature of anticipating changes and responding to ever-changing conditions. This being the case, in order to keep up with the recent changes in the business ecosystem and to achieve competitive advantage, developing existing capabilities and providing new capabilities- digital and non-digital- become indispensable for the redesigned business models of organisations. Yet, on this matter, the extant literature remains vague for revealing the link between these two concepts. Accordingly, this research aims to concretise the hazy link between the concept of digital business model and the dynamic capability approach. Consequently, the current state analysis conducted in this research sheds light on the key role of dynamic capabilities in digital business models, which was insufficiently discussed by previous researchers. Additionally, the outcomes and proposed research agenda hold a potential to pave the way for focusing more on extant and emerging capabilities that organisations need to possess while implementing digital technologies.

Keywords

Competitive Advantage, Digital Business Models, Dynamic Capability, Industry 4.0

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