Born Digitals: Understanding the Sustainable Competitive Advantage Across Different Markets

Abstract

Digitalization of business is one of the driving forces in today’s environment and seems to be an irreversible trend. At present we can observe not only a digital transformation of firms but also the emergence of firms that are digital from inception. The born digital firms have characteristics that allow them to quickly expand on international markets and stay competitive for sustained periods of time. The purpose of this study is to analyze the characteristics of born digital firms that lead to sustainable competitive advantage and to develop a conceptual model that will serve as a basis for future research. Various sources of born digitals’ competitive advantage are revealed, such as innovativeness, creativity, responsiveness, digital technology, and digital skills of their employees. One of the key findings is highlighting the role creativity plays in how responsive born digital firms can be in times of change, a characteristic that supports their sustainable competitiveness. The newly defined born digitals’ characteristics and sources of competitive advantage should embrace the approach to their competitive advantage across different markets as a complex dynamic construct that is presented, which includes technology advantage, human capital advantage, but also differentiation advantage.

Sustainable Competitive Advantage: A Literature Review and Future Research

“…Research related to sustainable competitive advantage (SCA) has previously been conducted in various scientific fields, such as research conducted by Adi et al, (2019); An & Oh, (2019); Ayeni et al, (2021); Çağlıyan et al, (2022);Camisón-Haba et al, (2022); Jarosiński et al, (2023); Lin et al, (2020);Özkan et al, (2021);Ramadan et al, (2020);Rizki et al, (2023); Wang et al, (2018); and Yang et al, (2018) who conducted research related to sustainable competitive advantage (SCA). The concept of Sustainable competitive advantage (SCA) is often associated with macro-scale companies or large companies (Xi et al, 2022), but there are few studies related to Sustainable competitive advantage (SCA) focused on micro-companies or in smaller-scale companies such as MSMEs Al-Shahwani, (2020); and Ma et al, (2019).…”

“…Abubakar et al, (2022) andPratono, (2022) explain that strategic management has the ultimate goal of being able to realize competitive advantage by creating better value than its competitors. Al-Shahwani, (2020); Jarosiński et al, (2023); Maulini et al, (2022) state that competitive advantage is the ability of a company to maintain its competitive strategy. Competitive advantage is the core of a company's performance in a competitive market (Quaye & Mensah, 2019).…”

Design and Implementation of a Model-Driven Software Production Method: from Strategy to Code

“…SOs are born as digital organisations (Jarosiński, Sekliuckiene, Kozma, et al, 2023), so they continuously face the challenge of digital transformation (DT), which is finding new ways to create value through technology. As defined by (Vial, 2021), DT is "a process in which digital technologies create disruptions that trigger strategic responses from organisations seeking to alter their pathways to create value while managing the structural changes and organisational barriers that affect the positive and negative results of this process".…”