While it is well established in literature that firms innovate and transform themselves in the face of discontinuous change, our knowledge of what drives business transformation remains limited. How and why are firms able to transform themselves and what are the implications for our body of knowledge? To understand what drives business transformation, we need to look into firms’ abilities to reconfigure resources in order to innovate. The resources that firms need to transform themselves are usually not available within the organization. Business transformation appears to be a contingent phenomenon that requires the efficacy of interactions between firms within a multiplicity of entitlements. Interactions explain how firms pursue business transformation. Entitlements explain why firms are able to pursue business transformation. This study offers new insights into the transformative potential of entitlements as a bundle of rights, duties and capabilities that firms possess, acquire, and transfer to other business actors in order to transform their businesses.
This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Journal of Business Research. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Journal of Business Research, 143, 2022 DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2022.01.053
