Research On E-business Value Creation Of Enterprises Based On Digital Strategic Action

Digital technologies,such as big data,mobile computing,platform architecture facilitate product/service and business model innovation,providing firms unprecedented opportunities to create value.Meanwhile,the value creation through application of digital innovation is with high uncertainty due to the hyper-competitive and transparent digital environment.It is the moves and counter moves that determine firms' final performance.However,the digital strategic actions firm initiated could be easily imitate or respond by competitors,resulting fierce inter-firm rivalry.Competitive advantages are hard to sustain.Under the dynamic competition driven by digital technologies,firms need to continuously initiate digital strategic actions associated with imitation barriers and develop value sources that competitors do not understand and own to prevent or delay competitors' response,capturing the e-business value.As such,firms need to comprehensively consider three parts,i.e.,the application of combination of internal resources,the effects of action in external market,and changes of moves in action sequences.Obviously,how to apply IT technology to realize and capture e-business value has become a challenge for both practice and theory.However,there are scant studies in IS to explore the e-business value creation in competitive dynamics.Although competitive dynamics literature have investigated the inter-firm rivalry,they did not consider the strategic impacts of IT on responses of competitors and did not explore the e-business value creation in competitive dynamics.To address above practical and theoretical gaps,this study combine theory in IS with strategic management to explore the e-business value creation in competitive dynamics.Specifically,this paper studies the combination of digital resources as the value source,characteristics of digital strategic actions associated with value realization,and the evolving regularities of move sequences to capture value.The results have significant theoretical contribution and practical implications for how firms should effectively manage digital strategic actions to realize and capture e-business value in digital-driven competitive dynamics.Based on extant literature on IT value and competitive dynamics,this study first identified the three interconnected research,i.e.,sources of e-business value,the realization of e-business value,and the regularity of capturing e-business value,proposing our overall research framework.Specifically,first,based on the theoretical lens of resource orchestration and digital innovation,this paper explored how to combine digital resources with complementary partnership resources to formulate imitation barrier and initiate effective digital strategic actions,i.e.,reducing number of responses,and delaying competitors' response timing.Second,from the action-response perspective from competitive dynamics,this paper further validated the effective ways in that firms can achieve competitive advantages.Third,drawn from the perspectives of action sequence in competitive dynamics,this paper considered the temporal characteristics of digital strategic actions and explored how to capture value in dynamic move sequence.Accordingly,this paper chose online travel firms in China as the research context and collect publicly available data to empirically test the overall theoretical framework.Above all,this paper first applied structured content analysis and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to explore the effective resource combination of digital strategic actions.Subsequently,panel regression was applied to testify the characteristics of digital strategic actions associated with value realization in competitive interactions and the evolving regularities of capturing value in move sequences.This study primarily got three conclusions.First,this study clarified the corresponding relationship between combination of competitive resources and digital strategic actions.Through the heterogenous combination of digital resources and partnership resources,firms could set up the imitation barrier and initiate effective digital strategic actions by deterring responses or delaying competitors' responses.This paper further summarized four propositions in terms of how to combine resources to initiate effective strategic moves.Second,this study validated the value realization effects of characteristics of digital strategic actions.The results show that the digital strategic actions associated with less responses would positively increase competitive advantages,and moves associated with long response timing would positively increase competitive advantages.Those findings indicate that deterring responses or delaying response timing could effectively bring about more competitive advantages to firms,consistent with arguments in extant competitive dynamics and IS literature.Meanwhile,the findings further demonstrate that the ebusiness value could be realized through digital strategic actions that could deter responses or delay response timing in competitive interactions.Third,this study explored how firms capture e-business value through the temporal evolving characteristics of move sequences,i.e.,unexpectedness and complexity.The results show that there are inverted U-shaped relationships between the unexpectedness of move sequences and e-business value,and complexity of move sequences and ebusiness value.The results indicate that the temporal evolving characteristics of move sequences including unexpectedness and complexity could facilitate value capture through confusing competitors' responding strategies.Meanwhile,the results indicate that the changing degree of move sequence should remain in a certain degree and firm would not capture value if the degree exceeds the threshold.The plausible reason lies in with the increasing in sequence dynamism,the learning and decision costs also increase,competitors also adjust to the frequent changing,failing to capturing value.This study contributes to extant literature in the following three ways: first,this study view the combination of digital resources and partnership resources as the source of value creation when e-business platforms initiate digital strategic actions to innovate in digital competitive dynamics,extending the focuses of heterogenous resources and capability as the value source.Moreover,based on the resource orchestration theory and digital innovation perspective,this study explored the combinatorial characteristics of fused interaction between digital technologies and partnerships,exceeding prior studies that primarily investigate the linear relationship between IT-driven competitive actions and competitive dynamics,and providing insights about exploring supporting resources of digital strategic actions in competitive dynamic context.Second,compared with extant IT value research that mainly incorporate resource utilization and process embeddedness as the key mediator,this study exploratively use the characteristics of digital strategic actions that associated with less competitor responding as a key intermediate variable to analyze the value realization,and discovers the differential impact which two important responding variables exert on competitive performance,revealing the value realization mechanism in competitive dynamics context.Third,this study reveals the regularities of value capturing in move sequence through characterizing different strategic action sequences and demonstrating the corresponding relationship with firm competitive performance,and discovers the inverted U-shaped relationship between the unexpectedness and complexity of the action sequence and the competitive performance,providing new insights about the value capturing mechanisms in action sequences and thus reducing the theoretical gaps of scant research on e-business value in continuous competition.