Tight-loose Coupling of Bundled Capabilities: The Imbalanced Utilization of Emerging Digital Technologies in Newspaper Businesses

摘要

Consistent with insights on the joint deployment of capabilities to exploit digital technologies for strategic innovations, recent works re-conceptualize such "dynamic" capabilities as bundles of capabilities. By analyzing the empirical case of German daily quality newspaper organizations, which failed to fully exploit the strategic potential of emerging digital technologies and entered a severe crisis, we examine how capabilities must be coupled to facilitate the strategic use of emerging digital technologies for organizational change. We show that imbalanced couplings of bundled capabilities may lead to one-sided perceptions of digital opportunities that impede strategic reorientations and drive the use of emerging digital technologies into narrow trajectories. Therefore, we conclude that couplings of capabilities must be balanced to fully exploit the strategic potential of emerging digital technologies for conducting organizational change.