How information technology influences opportunity exploration and exploitation firm's capabilities

Abstract Understanding how and why some firms have proficiency in exploring and exploiting opportunities is a cutting-edge research problem. Our central thesis is that information technology (IT) performs a key role in firms’ opportunity exploration and exploitation. We test the proposed theory using partial least squares path modeling on a combination of survey and secondary data from 203 Spanish firms. We find that: (1) IT infrastructure provides the foundation to build business experimentation and the flexibility to sense and explore business opportunities; and (2) IT-enabled business flexibility helps firms to develop the operational proficiency to exploit opportunities and increase their performance.

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