PhD Oral Exam - Amir AsadiAra, Business Administration

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

In an increasingly volatile, digitalized, and uncertain business environment, organizations face growing pressure to continuously review and improve how they create, deliver, and capture value. While information technologies (IT) are widely recognized as key enablers of organizational change, existing research offers limited explanation of how digital technologies translate into sustained adaptability and innovation at the organizational level.

Drawing on the affordance perspective and dynamic capabilities theory, this research advances a layered explanatory logic in which organizational IT affordances, specifically collaboration, memory, and process-management affordances, expand organizational action possibilities and, when routinized, enable sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring capabilities. These dynamic capabilities, in turn, shape firms’ ability to innovate their business models across value offering, value creation, and value capture dimensions. The empirical context of Canadian small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) operating in supply chain and manufacturing-adjacent sectors provides a revealing setting due to its environmental turbulence and resource constraints.

The dissertation comprises three essays. The first synthesizes crisis-era research through a systematic literature review to identify IT-enabled actions underlying dynamic capabilities during prolonged disruptions. The second empirically models organizational IT affordances as antecedents of dynamic capabilities using variance-based analysis. The third adopts a configurational approach to identify multiple, equifinal combinations of dynamic capabilities sufficient for distinct forms of business model innovation.

Collectively, the findings advance theory by disentangling IT affordances from capabilities, integrating variance-based and configurational approaches, and offering actionable guidance for managers seeking to leverage digital technologies for organizational resilience and competitive advantage.