This study examines how digital innovation cultivates organizational resilience by enabling continuous business model adaptation, and clarifies the pathway through which digital technologies are transformed from “data” into “resilience” in emerging markets.
This study adopts an exploratory single-case methodology, focusing on Hema, a retail subsidiary of Alibaba Group. Drawing on multi-source qualitative data, it analyzes digital innovation practices, business model adaptation processes and responses to external shocks, and develops a process model linking digital innovation, business model adaptation and organizational resilience.
The results identify a three-stage resilience pathway – resilience asset accumulation, resilience potential development and resilience capability manifestation – reinforced by a dynamic business model cycle of design, validation and transformation. It reveals that digital–physical integration, data-driven operations and digital intelligence support systems serve as core mechanisms shaping business model adaptation. These mechanisms enable demand-driven supply chain coordination, algorithm-assisted decision-making and rapid business model replication and transformation, thereby supporting the formation and evolution of organizational resilience. From an open innovation perspective, upstream C2B/C2M collaboration, ecosystem-level data sharing and outward platformization jointly generate bidirectional knowledge flows that enhance organizational adaptability and crisis response capabilities.
Results are analytically generalizable to data-rich, platform-orchestrated EM contexts. We propose testable propositions on how external search breadth/depth, coupling intensity and ecosystem governance moderate the digital innovation – adaptation = resilience pathway across EMs.
Managers in EMs can improve resilience by investing in store-supply chain data integration, algorithmic decision support and partner platformization, while instituting data-sharing rules that enable fast recombination under shocks.
Emerging-market societies can maintain access to essentials (fresh food and last-mile delivery) during shocks, reducing price spikes and service disruptions. New livelihood opportunities for upstream farmers/suppliers via C2B/C2M coordination and platformization, while raising governance needs around data sharing, algorithmic transparency, labor conditions (gig/“shared employees”) and unequal bargaining power in platform ecosystems. Policymakers should pair digital scaling with safeguards for privacy, fairness and inclusive participation.
By integrating digital innovation, business model adaptation and organizational resilience from a process perspective, this study moves beyond static views of resilience and endpoint-oriented analyses of digital transformation. Conceptualizing business model adaptation as an intermediary mechanism embedded in emerging market platform ecosystems, it extends theoretical explanations of the digital innovation–resilience relationship and offers actionable insights for platform ecosystem governance under uncertainty.
