In this article we provide a systematic review of the extensive yet diverse and fragmented literature on digital transformation (DT), with the goal of clarifying boundary conditions to investigate the phenomenon from the perspective of organizational change. On the basis of 279 articles, we provide a multi‐dimensional framework synthesizing what is known about DT and discern two important thematical patterns: DT is moving firms to malleable organizational designs that enable continuous adaptation, and this move is embedded in and driven by digital business ecosystems. From these two patterns, we derive four perspectives on the phenomenon of DT: technology impact, compartmentalized adaptation, systemic shift and holistic co‐evolution. Linking our findings and interpretations to existing work, we find that the nature of DT is only partially covered by conventional frameworks on organizational change. On the basis of this analysis, we derive a research agenda and provide managerial implications for strategy and organizational change.

Sustainable technologies challenge prevailing business practices, especially in industries that depend heavily on the use of fossil fuels. Firms are therefore in need of business models that transform the specific characteristics of sustainable technologies into new ways to create economic value and overcome the barriers that stand in the way of their market penetration. A key issue is the respective impact of incumbent and entrepreneurial firms' path-dependent behaviour on the development of such new business models. Embedded in the literature on business models, this paper explores how incumbent and entrepreneurial firms' path dependencies have affected the evolution of business models for electric vehicles. Based on a qualitative analysis of electric vehicle projects of key industry players over a five-year period (2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010), the paper identifies four business model archetypes and traces their evolution over time. Findings suggest that incumbent and entrepreneurial firms approach business model innovation in distinctive ways. Business model evolution shows a series of incremental changes that introduce service-based components, which were initially developed by entrepreneurial firms, to the product. Over time there seems to be some convergence in the business models of incumbents and entrepreneurs in the direction of delivering economy multi-purpose vehicles.

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Disruptive technologies tend to underperform on attributes that are considered as key attributes of incumbent technologies and require new value propositions to increase mainstream customer appeal. Yet, how do firms reconfigure their value proposition as a way to overcome the technological inferiority of disruptive technologies? This article conceptualizes and empirically investigates the process of value proposition reconfiguration. Based on evidence on the commercialization of electric vehicles, it explores the tactics firms use to reconfigure value propositions to increase market acceptance from mainstream customers. The article develops a framework showing three reconfiguration tactics: compensating, enhancing, and coupling tactics.

In the automotive industry the need to move towards more sustainable trajectories of innovation has received much attention. Car manufacturers have started to develop loweremission alternatives for the internal combustion engine, particularly electric, hybrid and fuel-cell vehicles. They face the challenge, however, of how to make a potentially disruptive, systemic, and societally embedded technology such as a low-emission vehicle attractive to mainstream customers. While literature has suggested that companies can empower the initial stages of disruptive innovation by creating protected spaces themselves and/or by taking advantage of such spaces created by public actors, the specific role of these different types of protection levers -private and/or public -has remained unclear. This article therefore investigates to what extent and how private and public protection levers affect firm-level strategies to increase the attractiveness of disruptive and systemic innovations to mainstream customers. This is explored empirically through a multiple case study of the emergence of low-emission vehicles within three car manufacturers -Daimler, General Motors and Toyota -in the context of European, Japanese and US policies. The empirical analysis is conducted on a dataset consisting of more than 9,000 articles from two trade magazines, a car magazine and a financial newspaper for the period of 1997 to 2010. As main findings, the article identifies regulation, tax incentives, and public-private partnerships as the public protection levers that impose or stimulate 'new' performance metrics such as fuel economy and vehicle emissions. It also finds that resource allocation, niche occupation and collaborationintegration act as the main private protection levers. Besides, two protection levers emerge from the data that are rather prominent in this context: the use of regulation imposing largescale commercialization of low-emission vehicles and dumping of products in the market below cost price. The article concludes with two different protection trajectories -a public protection trajectory and a private protection trajectory -which explain how car manufacturers leverage the various protection levers to deal with disruptive technology. The main implication of the two trajectories is that while the public protection trajectory stalled due to the systemic, socially embedded technological impediments of electric vehicles and fuel-cell vehicles, the private protection trajectory picked up the remains of the public protection trajectory and has gained momentum, continuing until today.

Given that entire industries face sustainability challenges, it is important to understand the dynamics that lead "firms-in-an-industry" to engage in sustainable product innovation. To provide more insight into the question of how innovation activities spread from individual firm action to an industry-wide engagement, this paper examines the automobile industry and the development of electric vehicles (EVs). The analysis covers automobile incumbents over a crucial decade for EV development in the industry, focusing on the different strategic motives that especially the so-called "first movers" used to justify their earlier engagement. We find that EVs became a core pillar of the incumbents' technology strategies through a combination of coercive, normative, and mimetic pressures. Yet, the strategic motives to engage in EVs stayed poles apart between different companies. The insights from our study are relevant for those interested in the diffusion of sustainable product innovation and in incumbent behaviour in sustainability transitions.

This article ties in directly with recently intensified interest in business models in international business (IB), using the energy transition as empirical context to explore their relevance in firm internationalization. The global energy transition presents a challenge for almost all industries, but some face specific difficulties particularly important from an IB perspective. We study a set of European firms that used to operate in a highly regulated context with (partial) state ownership, until government-directed market liberalization started to allow further competition and internationalization. Existing firms were prompted to adapt their business models to these changes, with new ventures entering the market to reap opportunities with novel energy-related technologies and business models. Linking insights from strategic management to the IB literature, we conceptualize business model-related specific advantages (BMSAs), and explore the role of BMSAs in the internationalization of the firms in our sample. We also uncover barriers to BMSA recombination in (potential) host countries, consider BMSA location-boundedness, and discuss implications for firms’ international expansion by presenting a new framework. Consequences for the energy transition and the actors already involved and (in)directly confronted with it are explicated, while outlining promising areas for further research, building on the insights and limitations of our study.

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