Research on the Pathways for Building Dynamic Capabilities of SMEs in the Context of Digital Transformation

Abstract

Digital transformation alters how SMEs orchestrate their resources and search for opportunities when building dynamic capabilities require capability boundaries, evolutionary mechanisms, and pathway combinations. The paper delineates the theoretical boundaries of dynamic capabilities in a digital context and its dimensions of sensing, integrating, and reconfiguring; analyzes reshaping capability structure via digital embeddedness with heterogeneous manifestation under resource constraints; explains mechanisms of digital opportunity sensing, data flows and organizational learning, and platform connections and relationship reconfiguration; proposes three construction pathways: sensing, integrating, and reconfiguring. Capability modularization and balance between connective invocation and internal absorption provides an explanatory framework for SMEs formulate adjusting, replaceable, and recoverable portfolio of capabilities.