Dynamic Capabilities in Digital Transformation How to be Successful in Digital Transformation

Abstract

Although firms on a large scale seemingly have realised the importance of becoming more digital in order to stay relevant in the future, organisations struggle to implement and scale digital initiatives outside isolated functions. This highlights the strategic and organisational hardships of transformation efforts. As such, there is an unrealised gap between current industry trends and effective implementation, leading to untapped potential and opportunities to be reaped by those who successfully manage to transform. Leading the purpose of this research, which is to gain better understanding of enabling factors that could alleviate firms trying to implement simulation technology to their business processes. Derived from the challenges associated with digital transformation, the purpose of this research is to investigate how capability management can be leveraged in digital transformation efforts. This topic has been researched through a qualitative method and more in depth through five semi-structured interviews with customers of the firm EDR Medeso. Each respondent has experience with both simulation technology and the organisational process of implementing it to the organisation. A narrative literature review has been carried out to support the conducted interviews, where two major themes of digital transformation and dynamic capabilities have been identified. Within the concluding chapter of the theoretical framework, the two themes have been identified as complementary which has resulted in an merger of the two. From this the authors have derived a combined framework containing 22 actions for firms facing a digital transformation to follow. The analysis further contrasts the presented framework with the conducted interviews, through which 17 out of 22 actions are confirmed by the empirics. To conclude, the managerial implications are that the presented framework gives guidance for firms to successfully digitally transform.