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

Abstract

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 premise that predictions related to the rate of adoption of technologies and the time it would take before the technology has been adopted by the average potential adopting firm technology is still a potential source of competitive advantage would be useful for IT business value researchers. Providing a comparison based on 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: Apply the resource based view analysis on the emerging technology to see if it is worth exploring duration of competitive advantage. Leverage Stratopoulos (2016) to develop an a priori testable benchmark duration. Contrast adopters with matched sample of non-adopters or late adopters to establish a duration advantage.