Page - 261 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

3.1 DTs as ‘Driving Force’ The perspective that viewsDTs as ‘disrupting force’ underlines the way of expe- riential knowledge accumulation is influenced by these emerging technologies (Coviello et al. 2017). According to this perspective, bothmarket-specific knowl- edge and general knowledge could be increasingly accumulated with the help of technologies. Thus, DTs would be indirectly associated with international oppor- tunity pursuit, and the relationship is mediated by experiential knowledge. We discuss how this can happen as follows. Market-specific knowledge Enhanced knowledge availability owing to DTs application can directly bring informationabout thepotentialmarket, allowing themto identifywhichmarkets are attractive for them (Coviello et al. 2017). Generally speaking, accelerated market-specific knowledge accumulation is gathering an increasing amount of knowledge about other players. By investigating a group of Indian IT firms, Paul andGupta (2014) claimed psychic distance is largely reduced in recent years, as a consequence of learning from virtual community through online interactions. Table 2 Two perspectives ofDTs DTs as ‘driving force’ DTs as ‘disrupting force’ Assumption DTs facilitating experiential knowledge acquisition DTs changing the relative importance of experiential knowledge Role The explanatory variable for knowledge acquisition Themoderating effect for the influenceof knowledge Metaphor DTs seen as a ‘reformer’ DT seen as a ‘revolutionary’ DT as ‘Driving Force’ Market-Specific Knowledge General Knowledge InternaƟonal Opportunity Pursuit DT as ‘DisrupƟng Force’ Fig. 1 Influence of Digital technologies (DTs) on international opportunity pursuit Pursuing International Opportunities in a Digitally EnabledWorld 269