Jasmina Berbegal-Mirabent, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

Angelo Cavallo, Politecnico di Milano

Antje Fiedler, University of Auckland

Esteban Lafuente, Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica

The accelerated diffusion of digital technologies has redefined the strategic landscape for both private and public organizations—e.g., universities, hospitals, and local administrations—which are often exposed to similar constraints in terms of access to resources, agility, and strategic planning. This digital transformation has opened new avenues for innovation, performance improvement, and competitive positioning, yet the literature remains fragmented on how digitalization is conceptualized across functional areas and levels of analysis. While large organizations have traditionally led digitalization efforts thanks to their greater resource availability, entrepreneurial ventures, SMEs, and public service providers are increasingly embarking on the digitalization journey to survive, remain competitive, or grow.

The integration of digital technologies into organizational and individual practices goes beyond a mere technological adoption process, and constitutes a profound socio-technical transition that reconfigures the interplay between human capabilities, technological resources, and institutional arrangements. These transitions unfold through co-evolutionary dynamics in which human practices, organizational routines, and digitally-enabled capabilities influence one another over time. Instead of focusing on technology adoption patterns, understanding these dynamics requires examining how human-technology interactions and architectures develop, and how these configurations shape long-term technological trajectories and pathways of organizational transformation.

Despite their transformative potential, leveraging digital technologies also brings significant challenges. Digital technologies put to the test traditional managerial paradigms, requiring better alignment between firms' digitalization processes, strategic planning, and execution, and internal resource bases. For firms, digitalization can generate benefits in various dimensions (e.g., operational efficiency, innovation, and financial and non-financial outcomes), but technology adoption is also associated with risks of misalignment between technology and strategy, and exposure to cybersecurity threats. At the individual level, digitization and particular AI tools create new possibilities for automation, augmentation, and personalized learning, but simultaneously raise concerns about motivation, overreliance, and responsible use. Consequently, scholars have begun to unpack the complex relationship between digitalization and performance, suggesting that technological adoption must be contextualized within firms' strategic capabilities and operational models and individuals' motivations and expected outcomes.

Nevertheless, organizations face a 'digitalization paradox': while digitalization can unlock significant performance benefits—including innovation, knowledge spillovers, internationalization, and sustainability goals—its adoption process is fraught with resource constraints, knowledge gaps, and organizational inertia. Recent empirical evidence focused on SMEs emphasize the positive outcomes of digitalization, but only when firms possess the necessary internal capabilities, strategic orientation, digitally skilled workforce, and leadership and innovation capacities to effectively leverage digital technologies. These tensions underscore the need for a more nuanced understanding of how digital strategies are conceived, deployed, and leveraged across private and public organizations, where legacy processes, regulatory rigidity, and funding limitations often delay or complicate digital transformation.

Moreover, the 'dark side' of digitalization—such as technology-resource misfit, digital fatigue, or misalignment between strategy and technology adoption—remains underexplored. In this context, digitalization cannot be treated as a monolithic enabler, but rather as a contingent process shaped by organizational, technological, and environmental antecedents. Qualitative evidence suggests that when decision rights, data flows, and competencies are not redesigned in concert, technology-organization misalignments can erode anticipated performance gains despite greater data availability. Digitization, particularly AI, may also introduce additional complexity and shift the nature of uncertainty, requiring organizations to further adapt and reconfigure their decision-making processes. Whether digitalisation benefits incumbents or entrepreneurs remains unresolved, as emerging evidence points to asymmetric outcomes in which new technologies can both entrench existing power structures and catalyse entrepreneurial entry.

The challenge for researchers is to further scrutinize how organizations orchestrate digital tools and capabilities to enhance performance outcomes, and how various (organizational, technological, or contextual) variables condition these relationships. Researchers should adopt a critical perspective that allows for new insights on the outcomes of performance-enhancing strategic actions that rely on digital technologies in different economic settings.

This special issue encourages rigorous inquiry into the processes, mechanisms, and contingencies that underpin the adoption and impact of digital technologies in private firms and comparable service-oriented public institutions. One key area of interest concerns the organizational, technological, and institutional antecedents that drive organizations to engage in digital transformation. Despite growing awareness of the need to digitalize, firms and public institutions continue to exhibit heterogeneity in the strategic reconfiguration of their business models, knowledge assets, and innovation portfolios, leading to varied pathways of digitalization and performance outcomes. Contributions are invited that investigate the motivations, contextual pressures, and capability configurations that influence these digitalization pathways.

Another critical research area relates to the performance consequences of digitalization processes. While numerous studies have shown the potential of digital technologies to generate both financial and non-financial benefits, more research is needed to fully unveil the mechanisms through which such outcomes emerge in different organizational settings and for different units of analysis (e.g., at the firm, product, or team level). Studies are welcomed that assess how digitalization affects performance metrics—such as innovation capacity, internationalization, operational flexibility, market-related metrics, and environmental outcomes—particularly in light of the specific resource endowments that most organizations have to deal with. Contributions that examine how universities and other public service organizations manage their digital transformation journey—such as the adoption of hybrid learning platforms, e-administration, and AI-enabled service delivery—and how these transformations influence their specific outcomes (e.g., students' performance, service delivery, and operational restructuring) are also of interest. Research exploring how these changes affect the capacity of public institutions to contribute to regional innovation ecosystems and to support their stakeholders, such as SMEs, entrepreneurs, and larger organizations, is also welcomed.

Prospective contributors are encouraged to adopt novel theoretical lenses or robust empirical strategies to investigate how firms and public service institutions initiate, manage, and assess their digitalization efforts, and how such efforts interact with internal resources and external environments to influence their outcomes. In methodological terms, case-based, conceptual, and empirically based submissions are encouraged. Review articles (i.e., bibliometric studies, systematic reviews, or meta-analyses) will not be considered for publication. Authors are recommended to pay explicit attention to the managerial implications of their findings.

Potential topics

• What are the key organizational, technological, institutional, and market-related antecedents that influence SMEs' digitalization strategies? Are there differences between industries or economic contexts?
• What strategic choices underpin the digitally-induced actions of organizations? And, what prerequisites support such strategies at the organization and operational level?
• How do socio-technical system readiness factors—including technical infrastructure, organizational culture, workforce capabilities, and data governance maturity—interact to shape the adoption of digital technologies in different organizational contexts?
• How do ecosystem characteristics (e.g., governance structures, network density, public-sector involvement) shape the emergence of digitally enabled interactions among actors?
• How can digital technologies be integrated into firm operations to promote the development of value-adding strategies? What organizational resources, processes, and competencies support the integration of digital technologies in firm operations?
• For what strategic purposes (automation, augmentation, cybersecurity, or innovation) do firms integrate digital technologies in their routines and processes?
• How do digital literacy, ethical concerns, organizational culture, and managerial practices shape the adoption and usage of digital technologies?
• How do public service organizations with constrained resources plan, govern, and execute their digitalization processes?
• What lessons can be drawn regarding leadership, governance structures, and resource orchestration in public institutions? To what extent do their digital initiatives (e.g., e-administration, hybrid learning platforms, AI-enabled service delivery) generate spillover effects that foster innovation and digital readiness among regional SMEs?
• How do collaborations between public sector and industry influence the adoption and scaling of digital technologies? What governance models, knowledge-sharing mechanisms, or incentive structures enhance the co-creation of digital solutions and help firms develop stronger absorptive capacity? Are such partnerships more effective in certain sectors or regional ecosystems, and what are their long-term performance outcomes for both parties?
• How does a digitalization process influence individual-level outcomes (e.g., productivity, learning, creativity, and decision quality) and firm-level outcomes (e.g., innovation, internationalization, operational and team efficiency, and sustainability)?
• What mechanisms explain the heterogeneous outcomes resulting from digitally-enabled transformations across individuals, teams, and firms? Moreover, how do digital literacy, human-technology interactions, and strategic use of digital technologies shape these outcomes?
• Do organizations aligning their strategic competencies and digital technologies achieve superior competitive and performance outcomes?
• How do digital transformation processes reshape power between entrants and incumbents, and with what performance consequences?

Timeline

• February 28, 2026: Open for submissions
• January 31, 2027: Paper submission deadline
• April 30, 2027: First-round review decision to authors
• July 30, 2027: Revised manuscript due
• October 31, 2027: Second-round review decision to authors
• January 31, 2028: Final revised manuscript due
• April 30, 2028: Final author notification of acceptance