Digitalized opportunity space and managerial archetypes: An opportunity-centric perspective on digital innovation and transformation

Abstract

As proliferating digital literature ignores how digital opportunities are generated in the first place, digital innovation and transformation can be ontologically ungrounded. To fill this gap, following a realist perspective of entrepreneurship, this article examines digital opportunities as profit propensities afforded by a digitalized environment, while treating digital innovation and transformation as the actualization process. To elaborate, first, we coin Digitalized Opportunity Space (DOS) to describe the digitalized environment as a critical intersection of four spaces - resource, utility, digital, and institutional- that muster conditions without which digital opportunities cannot be actualized. Second, we develop four managerial archetypes - resource orchestrators, utility integrators, digital evangelists, and institutional realists- who tend to recognize digital opportunities based on their organizational location and thereby endorse different digital innovations. Third, to facilitate a systemic and balanced approach to digital transformation, we recommend group-level heuristics - the generic density perspective, the ecosystem view of the firm, multi-dimensional network effects, and disciplined imagination- which restore totality from partiality. Taken together, the DOS framework (of opportunity generation), the managerial archetypes (of opportunity recognition), and the group-level heuristics (of opportunity actualization) constitute the opportunity-centric (vs technology-centric or organization-centric) perspective on digital innovation and transformation, thereby materializing the connection between digital literature and entrepreneurship.