ANTECEDENTS OF IT DYNAMIC CAPABILITIES IN THE CONTEXT OF THE DIGITAL DATA GENESIS

Dynamic capabilities represent an important determinant of competitive advantage in turbulent environments. However, despite intense work in the area, the issue of the antecedents of dynamic capabilities remains poorly researched. Understanding the sources of dynamic capabilities would give organizations instruments to rationally improve their chance of gaining and sustaining competitive advantage. We contribute to the literature on information technology dynamic capabilities by focusing on three sources of dynamic capabilities: organizational processes, firm history and firm’s assets. We lay the theoretical and methodological groundwork for our explanation and empirically test our model by focusing on an emerging capability we term Digital Data Genesis (DDG). We define DDG as the dynamic capability of (1) choosing information technology to generate and capture data in digital form unobtrusively, (2) integrating the IT in the appropriate business processes, and (3) managing the digital data so captured .Our results show that the organizational processes of sensing and learning, the historical information dynamic capability, and the historical IT dynamic capability influence the DDG dynamic capability.