Exploration and exploitation of multiple values: The dynamic evolution process of sustainable entrepreneurship in Chinese digital platform corporates

Abstract

AbstractAs a booster of entrepreneurship and innovation, digital technologies are gradually unlocking their transformative potential to mitigate and address major environmental and social problems, together with the platform connecting stakeholders, they offer new opportunities for value co‐creation. While the digital sustainable entrepreneurship framework, encompassing opportunity recognition and exploiting process, is still in the preliminary exploration. The article focalize the digital platform application cases of four sustainable start‐ups and attempts to deconstruct the process of digital sustainable entrepreneurship grounded in the dynamic capability theory. The results indicate that the company integrates the identification of sustainability issues and prediction of heterogeneous needs into multiple opportunity perception, thus establishing stakeholder identification and psychological empowerment to reserve implicit resources, so as to realize the creation of mixed value based on digital platform construction and interaction. The process of “perception–accumulation–co‐creation” presents an alternating cycle of evolution. The results provide support for sustainable entrepreneurship by highlighting the role of dynamic capability as action potentials connected with digital platforms, which in turn foster the study of digital innovation management.