Digital strategy implementation: the role of individual entrepreneurial orientation and relational capital

In transformational strategy contexts such as digitalization, the entrepreneurial behavior of the firm’s employees is crucial. This study examines the role of employees’ individual-level entrepreneurial orientation (IEO) in terms of proactiveness, risk-taking, and innovativeness, and their relational capital within the organization, on their performance in achieving organizations’ digital strategy goals. We hypothesize that all IEO dimensions are positively associated with employees’ digital strategy performance and that relational capital positively moderates the effect of proactiveness and risk-taking but negatively moderates the effect of innovativeness. The results of an intra-organizational survey of 166 employees at a medium-sized Northern European manufacturing firm provide partial support for our hypotheses. As part of the empirical design, we introduce a four-dimensional scale for organizational and individual digital strategy performance (Digital – Management, Infrastructure, Networking, and development – MIND). With this scale, we contrast the informants’ self-assessment of their individual performance against the assessment of the overall organizational performance. Our study is one of the first to investigate IEO in a digital strategy context and provides implications for harnessing employees' entrepreneurial and innovative potential in digital transformation

“Real impact”: challenges and opportunities in bridging the gap between research and practice – making a difference in industry, policy, and society

Achieving impact from academic research is a challenging, complex, multifaceted, and interconnected topic with a number of competing priorities and key performance indicators driving the extent and reach of meaningful and measurable benefits from research. Academic researchers are incentivised to publish their research in high-ranking journals and academic conferences but also to demonstrate the impact of their outputs through metrics such as citation counts, altmetrics, policy and practice impacts, and demonstrable institutional decision-making influence. However, academic research has been criticized for: its theoretical emphasis, high degree of complexity, jargon-heavy language, disconnect from industry and societal needs, overly complex and lengthy publishing timeframe, and misalignment between academic and industry objectives. Initiatives such as collaborative research projects and technology transfer offices have attempted to deliver meaningful impact, but significant barriers remain in the identification and evaluation of tangible impact from academic research. This editorial focusses on these aspects to deliver a multi-expert perspective on impact by developing an agenda to deliver more meaningful and demonstrable change to how “impact” can be conceptualized and measured to better align with the aims of academia, industry, and wider society. We present the 4D model - Design, Deliver, Disseminate, and Demonstrate - to provide a structured approach for academia to better align research endeavors with practice and deliver meaningful, tangible benefits to stakeholders.</p