Exercising Due Diligence in Studies of Duration of Competitive Advantage Due to Emerging Technology Adoption

Abstract

ABSTRACTMotivated by the study of Reinking et al. (2015), the study proposes a due diligence process for future studies aiming to investigate the duration of competitive advantage due to emerging technology adoption. The proposed process is based on the following premise: Predictions related to rate of adoption are useful to IT business value researchers because technology adoption remains a potential source of competitive advantage until adoption rate has reached approximately 50 percent. Based on a comparison of two technologies (ERP and e-commerce), the study provides the following three recommendations for researchers interested in productivity and financial performance-related payoffs due to emerging technology adoption: (1) apply the resource-based view analysis on the emerging technology to see if the duration of competitive advantage is worth exploring; (2) leverage the synthesis done by Stratopoulos (2016) to develop an a priori testable benchmark duration; and (3) contrast adopters with a matched sample of non-adopters or late adopters to establish a duration advantage.