Why do some firms perform digital transformation faster than others?

On Friday 6 December 2024 Lars Arvei Moen will hold a trial lecture on a prescribed topic and defend his thesis for the PhD degree at NHH.

Lars Arvei Moen’s thesis consists of three papers investigating how strategy and digital transformation can work together to enhance firms' ability to compete in a digital landscape. His research seeks to understand the following:

The first paper examines differences in firms’ strategic commitment to digital transformation. This is important as top management’s attention is limited, and managers with a higher strategic orientation towards digitalization transform faster. Moen and his co-authors test this by analyzing three different strategic orientations from annual reports of Norwegian publicly traded firms over ten years.

Historical Inequality and Mobility in Norway

On Friday 29 November 2024 Eirik Berger Abel will hold a trial lecture on a prescribed topic and defend his thesis for the PhD degree at NHH.

They find that, short term, attention to either strategic orientation creates complementarity and enhances each other sequentially. However, long term, they only find individual self-reinforcing effects. This may explain why firms with a sustained digital orientation evolve faster than others.

The second paper examines how digitalization efforts vary among firms over time. Moen and his co-authors utilized the Covid-19 lockdown as a natural experiment that encouraged all companies to embrace digitalization. The authors surveyed 823 Norwegian CEOs' responses to the lockdown and digitalization efforts. The findings indicate that the digital leaders before the pandemic extended their advantage further during lockdown, outpacing all other firms.

The third paper explores a paradox in academic literature regarding optimal growth strategies for digital firms. It contrasts the "focus strategy," which emphasizes scale, with the "diversification strategy," which involves platform envelopment and bundling. By applying a novel conceptual model, the paper suggests that optimal strategies are contextual and depend on a firm’s level of digital transformation relative to its competitors.

From the Bank of Finland to a PhD at NHH

Heidi Koponen has always been drawn to the field of macroeconomics and policy.

In sum, this thesis adds insights into why some firms are more proactive in building strategies for digital transformation, why some accelerate their digitalization faster than others, and how to choose the optimal digital growth strategy.