Modern digital technologies and strategic change: new insights on digital transformation and business model innovation

With the accelerating use of digital technologies, such as big data and artificial intelligence, in organisations, there are now an increasing number of reports suggesting that most organisations face problems and challenges in using digital technologies and even fail to achieve project and impact goals.

These reports are important because they question current conventional wisdom and challenge existing knowledge about strategic change and suggest that there are specific characteristics and properties of modern digital technologies that create new challenges and demands for strategic change. The current situation raises the general question of why and how some companies succeed and others fail in using modern digital technologies.

This project begins to answer this question by focusing on successful digital transformation (DT)outcomes to better understand how companies manage the challenges and demands that digital technologies create for strategic change. We address this by focusing on a key issue in the area – digital transformation for business model innovation, and how strategic financial management contributes to this process. We conduct case studies to address our research question.

The project’s findings are important because they increase the understanding of the factors and circumstances that influence the effective and ineffective (e.g. troubled and failed) use modern digital technologies. The project is the first to study the role of strategic financial management in this context.

The project is funded by The Swedish Research Council. Participating researchers are Christian Ax (Gothenburg School of Business, Economics and Law) and Anders Hersinger (Luleå University of Technology). The project duration is 2024-2026.