Guest editorial: Digital transformation, strategic management and entrepreneurial process: dynamics, challenges and opportunities

The current era is characterized by the advent of the so-called “digital transformation” (Berman, 2012; Hess et al., 2016; Matt et al., 2015; Westerman et al., 2014). This phenomenon profoundly influences the behaviors and operations of organizations (Verhoef et al., 2019). The significant diffusion of the digital and new technologies are among the key drivers for many companies in the global scenario (Badescu and Garcés-Ayerbe, 2009; Trabucchi et al., 2017; Troise et al., 2021, 2022a, b). Digital transformation enables several changes in entrepreneurship and in organizations strategies, processes and interactions. It is changing the way different players operate and how organizations' function. Despite its strong impact on the economy of many countries, the booming of digital transformation – and the strong use of new technologies – raises a growing number of questions on the changes that traditional businesses, strategies and management practices companies need to establish to respond to them. Particularly, strategic decision-making process represents a key to explore in the digital transformation era. The use of new technologies to radically improve the enterprises' performance and/or reach (Westerman et al., 2014; Troise et al., 2022a) is a hot topic for scholars and practitioners worldwide. Complex transformations influence many areas such as strategic direction, competitiveness, business model, decision-making, innovation, entrepreneurship and productivity. These transformations present important opportunities for both companies and entrepreneurs (Aydalot and Keeble, 2018; Cohen et al., 2017; Li et al., 2018; Troise and Tani, 2021). In this scenario, managers, chief information officers (CIOs) and other senior executives face the challenge to handle the opportunities and risks of this digital transformation (Hess et al., 2016). In fact, many boards of directors and senior management teams aspire to the efficiencies, innovations and competitive advantages that digital transformations might deliver (Andriole, 2017). Digital transformations may create significant opportunities for companies to design new business models and change their operations to leverage them (Berman, 2012). A high number of companies, in almost every industry, have conducted several initiatives to explore these new technologies and to exploit their benefits (Hess et al., 2016; Matt et al., 2015). The exploitation of new technologies affects companies and productivity, business processes and innovation management in particular (Matt et al., 2015). In this evolving scenario, many new technologies have entered the arena and among the most promising are artificial intelligence (AI), IoT, digital platforms, big data, apps, cloud computing, machine learning, blockchain and others (such as the financial technologies). These new technologies can also affect business model innovation and can lead to the transformation of several traditional businesses (Mustafa, 2015; Zhong and Nieminen, 2015). Among these business models, smart meters (Kendel and Lazaric, 2015) and smart city (Capdevila and Zarlenga, 2015; Dupont et al., 2015) are two significant examples. Over the years, scholars tried to predict the evolutionary patterns in industries based on systemic technologies (Manral, 2011) or to identify the benefits seen by management in high technology strategic alliances (Powers and Wilson, 2010). The current literature shows some contributions that investigated different types of factors (environmental, political, etc.) affecting strategic decision-making processes (Elbanna et al., 2014). In this digital transformation era, networks and partnerships offer companies access to new technologies (often previously unknown to the organizations) or to new markets, leveraging new innovations and jointly developed knowledge (Clauss and Spieth, 2017; Kilubi, 2016; Roth et al., 2017). Digital transformation has received sustained interest in the current literature; however, this topic is still in its infancy in the strategic management research stream. In fact, this important area presents a limited number of contributions and is understudied, even as both practice and policy continue to rapidly advance. Inevitably, the digital revolution raises several questions on the traditional businesses outlook. Accordingly, the main research questions, both for scholars and practitioners, are related to the impact of these new technologies and to the improvement of the understanding of strategic management. Scholars know very little about the dynamics of new technologies and their impacts on strategic decision-making process. In fact, there is little knowledge on strategic management in the digital transformation era. This special issue tries to shed some further lights in this field and provide evidence on the main strategies company are exploiting to deal with the new technologies and how they can affect their decision-making process. Furthermore, the recent COVID-19 pandemic provides a significant opportunity of research, given its impact on companies' behaviors (Ghobadian et al., 2022).