Guest editorial: special issue–unraveling SMEs’ performance: the relevance of digitalization and resource-based competencies

Understanding how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) create value and sustain their competitive position has been a central concern in management research. Building on the resource-based view (RBV) and the dynamic capabilities perspective, firm performance does not merely stem from the access to key resources but from the ability to orchestrate and reconfigure them in response to changing environmental conditions (e.g. Barney, 1991; Helfat and Peteraf, 2003; Teece, 2018). Over the past decade, digital technologies have become deeply embedded in operational processes, business models and interorganizational relationships. As a result, the discussion has tended to converge toward the role of digitalization in the value creation process (e.g. Acs et al., 2022; Lafuente et al., 2023b). For SMEs, digitalization has been presented as a potential catalyst for innovation, competitiveness and resilience (e.g. Li et al., 2018; Galindo-Martín et al., 2023; Hoang and Hien, 2024; Vaillant et al., 2025). But, despite the growing diffusion of digital technologies, the translation of digital investments into superior performance remains far from automatic.

Digitalization is of particular relevance in the specific context of SMEs, where firms are simultaneously exposed to strong competitive pressures to digitalize their structure and operations and to structural constraints related to their liabilities of smallness and newness, technological skills and organizational slack (e.g. Ghobakhloo et al., 2022; Kalender and Zilka, 2024). Prior work provides important insights into these dynamics but also reveals various limitations. First, digitalization is frequently treated as a monolithic construct, measured through adoption indicators that obscure the heterogeneity of SMEs’ digital resources, capabilities and strategies (Meier, 2021; Kallmuenzer et al., 2025). Second, performance is often operationalized using narrow financial indicators, neglecting innovation, operational and strategic dimensions that are also core to SMEs’ long-term competitiveness (Lopes and Martins, 2021; Lin et al., 2023). Third, studies tend to overlook the role of organizational barriers, path dependencies and capability complementarities that shape the effectiveness of digitalization initiatives (Jones et al., 2021; Packmohr et al., 2023; Senna et al., 2023). Consequently, although the digitalization-performance relationship is widely acknowledged, the mechanisms through which digital resources translate into performance outcomes remain unpacked, particularly in resource-constrained and institutionally diverse environments (Lafuente et al., 2024).

This Special Issue was conceived to address these literature gaps and to promote a theoretically grounded debate that helps us to understand SMEs’ digitalization. The primary objective of our effort was to advocate for multidisciplinary research to advance knowledge on the digitalization-performance nexus, paying special attention to studies that examine the mechanisms linking digital resources to multidimensional performance outcomes. In addition, we sought to improve the technological scrutiny of SMEs by recognizing their distinctive constraints, organizational structures and learning processes and by treating SMEs as theoretically distinct rather than scaled-down versions of large firms.

Collectively, the collection of papers included in this Special Issue responds to these objectives and show that digitalization is more than a “plug-and-play” solution for SMEs. Instead, it is a complex process in which value creation hinges on how firms orchestrate digital resources, develop complementary capabilities and manage their organizational structures. Several contributions highlight that digital resources often exert their influence on innovation and performance only through intermediate capability-building mechanisms. For example, the contributions by Márquez-Álvarez et al. (2026), Núñez et al. (2026) and Maldonado-Guzman (2026) provide empirical evidence that digital assets translate into product and process innovation primarily when they activate collaborative routines, absorptive capacity and learning processes, rather than through direct effects. These findings reinforce the view that digitalization outcomes are fundamentally endogenous to organizational capability configurations.

Other contributions emphasize the role of digital maturity and strategic alignment in shaping performance heterogeneity. Digital maturity is conceptualized as a multidimensional trajectory encompassing technological readiness, organizational practices and external connectivity and it has been shown to be a key determinant of innovation performance and resilience in SMEs (Hornyák and Szerb, 2026; Neira et al., 2026; Geldes et al., 2026). By treating digital maturity as a process rather than a static state, these studies provide nuances to grasp how similar technologies can produce divergent outcomes depending on firms’ capability endowments and strategic orientations.

The special issue also sheds light on the “dark side” of digitalization by examining organizational barriers and contextual constraints. Barriers related to skills, financing, cultural resistance and technological complexity are shown to weaken the effectiveness of digital strategies and to condition the relationship between digital resources and innovation performance (Faith-Vargas and Martinez, 2026; Núñez et al., 2026; Seclen-Luna et al., 2026). This evidence underscores the need for a more critical perspective that recognizes digitalization as a double-edged sword capable of generating both opportunities and risks for SMEs.

By integrating these diverse perspectives, the Special Issue advances existing knowledge in, at least, two main ways. First, rooted in the RBV and dynamic capabilities theories, the studies included in the special issue demonstrate that digital resources contribute to performance primarily through capability-building and strategic alignment mechanisms. Second, the Special Issue reinforces the contextual grounding of digitalization research by providing evidence from emerging economies where resource constraints and diverse institutional contexts condition digital transformation processes and their multi-faceted outcomes (incorporating financial, innovation, operational and strategic dimensions).

Our journey started in November 2024 with the intention of satisfying our academic curiosity, which motivated us to encourage contributors to produce research that challenges canonical approaches and adopts a critical angle that sheds valuable insights on the performance repercussions of digitalization and resource-based strategies in SMEs. Indeed, the call received great support from scholars in the field and the journal’s editorial team. Obviously, all our efforts simply would not have been possible without the support and nurturing of the journal’s Editor-in-Chief, José Ernesto Amorós, to whom we express our deepest gratitude.

As a result of our joint efforts, the collection of papers included in this special issue brings together studies that address various aspects related to digitalization and resource-based competencies in SMEs, which until now had remained largely unaddressed. In our view, this special issue advances our knowledge by providing clear nuances of how both SMEs can learn and generate different benefits from digital assets and investments, while identifying how these actions affect different organizational outcomes, in terms of processes and performance.

The remainder of this editorial is structured as follows. Section 2 overviews the eight manuscripts included in this Special Issue and their contribution. Next, based on the analysis of the selected papers, Section 3 concludes by outlining promising directions for future research, with particular attention to capability complementarities, performance multidimensionality and the unintended consequences of digital transformation in resource-constrained environments.

After an exhaustive peer review process, this special issue includes eight articles that significantly advance the analysis of the operational and organizational outcomes of digitalization processes in SMEs.

By analyzing the approaches adopted by the selected papers, we observe that the digitalization-performance connection in SMEs can be researched from multiple angles. Part of the value of the papers included in this Special Issue lies in their capacity to bring together theoretical premises from different fields, including the resource-based and dynamic capability theories, innovation management and arguments closer to operations management and information systems research. This multidisciplinary integration enables a more fine-grained understanding of how digitalization unfolds as a strategic and organizational process rather than as a purely technological input. The richness of the selected papers also becomes evident in their methodological diversity – which covers quantitative studies based on a wide range of estimation techniques – and in the geographic variety of the analyzed settings, covering different Latin American economies (six studies), Spain (one study) and SMEs from multiple countries in Europe, Latin America and Asia (one study).

By using multiple analytical methods applied to cross-sectional and multi-country data sets, the selected papers contribute to identifying distinct patterns that characterize digitalization processes and their performance outcomes in SMEs. In particular, the contributions contribute to understand how operational mechanisms – such as Industry 4.0 adoption, digital process integration and digitally enabled innovation routines – and strategic mechanisms – such as digital strategy formulation, digital maturity trajectories, dynamic capability development and strategic alignment – jointly shape various performance outcomes among SMEs.

The diversity of the selected papers is consistent with and further reinforces the logic underlying this Special Issue, which emphasizes the need to analyze the antecedents and impacts of digitalization through complementary organizational, technological and strategic lenses. Concretely, the Special Issue brings together contributions that examine digitalization as an operational transformation process and as a strategic reconfiguration mechanism. In doing so, the selected papers show that, rather being driven by the mere adoption of digital technologies, digitalization outcomes are contingent upon firms’ resource endowments, organizational routines and strategic alignment.

Overall, the collection of studies presented within this Special Issue delivers valuable insights into how SMEs capitalize on digitalization from organizational, economic and innovation management perspectives. As such, their contributions confirm that SMEs generate performance outcomes at different levels through different digitalization mechanisms. Also, the selected papers confirm that the outcomes of digitalization processes go beyond financial figures to encompass innovation, operational efficiency and strategic competitiveness.

Table 1 briefly summarizes the contributions of the articles composing the Special Issue. For enhanced appreciation of their contributions, in what follows we analyze the selected papers according to their dominant digitalization-performance mechanisms and contextual settings.

Three studies deal with the analysis of how digitalization influences business performance.

Focusing on Industry 4.0 technologies, the research Geldeset al. (2026) evaluate how different digital production technologies influence SMEs’ financial and market-oriented performance across various business model configurations. Using survey data for 515 Chilean SMEs, the authors distinguish between base and front-end Industry 4.0 technologies and test whether their performance effects vary across B2B, B2C and B2G firms. The findings reveal that digital technologies generate heterogeneous performance outcomes depending on the firm’s dominant business model. In particular, the authors found that base technologies (e.g. cloud computing, big data and cybersecurity) significantly improve financial and market-oriented performance among B2B firms, while the influence of front-end technologies [e.g. 3-D printing and artificial intelligence (AI)-augmented processes] is marginally relevant in B2C firms. The relevance of this study lies in showing that operational digitalization is not a one-size-fits-all strategy and that firms’ technology configuration must be aligned with their value creation logic.

The study by Rojas-Cabezaset al. (2026) examines the role of digital resources and digital strategies in explaining innovation performance among 3733 SMEs operating in Latin America and the Caribbean. By using a partial least squares structural equation model (PLS-SEM) model, the findings show that the formulation of a digital strategy influence innovation outcomes by improving cocreation routines and that digital resources also impact innovation through digital strategy formulation. These findings indicate that strategic alignment between digital assets and innovation-oriented strategies is essential for generating superior innovation performance. The value of this study lies in validating the central role of strategic mechanisms in the digitalization-performance nexus.

Adopting a composite indicator building approach, Hornyák and Szerb (2026) propose a web-based digital maturity index (WebIX) to assess SMEs’ digital presence and competitiveness across firms operating in Europe, Latin America and Asia. By analyzing more than 1000 SME websites, the authors construct a multidimensional measure of digital maturity that captures firms’ online visibility, technological sophistication and customer engagement practices. The results indicate that web-based digital maturity levels are systematically associated with greater adoption of front-end technologies, which are common in B2C firms. This study contributes to the literature by providing an objective and scalable operationalization of digital maturity to observe and evaluate SMEs’ digital capabilities.

The second group of paper analyzes the strategic mechanisms through which digitalization impacts various performance outcomes.

Seclen-Luna et al. (2026) analyze how technological strategies and innovation jointly shape financial outcomes in 1712 manufacturing firms operating in seven Latin American countries. The results show that internal R&D investment and technology licensing are positively correlated with performance (sales and profits), highlighting that financial performance is contingent upon the ability to capitalize on internal and external knowledge flows. The main contribution of this study lies in demonstrating that a strong alignment between technology-based strategies and operational strategies is needed to fully realize the potential benefits of technological investments.

Focusing on digital resources, Maldonado-Guzman (2026) analyzes how the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies influences financial and sustainable performance in Mexican SMEs. Based on survey data from 307 firms, the authors found that the implementation of digital resources linked to Industry 4.0 technologies contribute to both financial and sustainable outcomes. The findings reveal that the value of digital technologies is not restricted to financial dimensions, but also to relevant sustainability aspects which are essential to meet environmental challenges faced by organizations (Lafuente et al., 2018).

The study Faith-Vargas and Martinez (2026) investigate how digital strategies and collaborative coinnovation practices shape product innovation among SMEs operating in five Latin American countries. Using survey data for 572 SMEs and estimating a series of seemingly unrelated (SUR) biprobit models, the authors analyze the interdependencies between digital strategy formulation, digitalization processes and participation in coinnovation collaborations. The main results show that developing a digital strategy is strongly associated with the likelihood of engaging in digitalization processes and that both horizontal and vertical coinnovation collaborations are positively associated with SMEs’ product innovation efforts. The contribution of this study lies in uncovering digital strategy as a central mechanism through which SMEs can more successfully develop their digitalization process. In addition, the findings highlight the importance for product innovation investments of knowledge sharing across firms’ value chain.

Building on the RBV and the absorptive capacity logic, Márquez-Álvarezet al. (2026) focus evaluate how digitally enabled cocreation practices foster process and product innovation. Using structural equation modeling on a sample of 124 Costa Rican SMEs, the authors found that cocreation routines operate as dynamic capability-building mechanisms that convert digital resources into innovation outcomes. The study contributes to the literature by clarifying a sequential capability building mechanism that integrates service-dominant logic and absorptive capacity theory: the innovation payoff of CI resources occurs only when collaborative routines and process innovation capabilities are jointly activated.

Finally, Neiraet al. (2026) analyze how AI readiness and digital facilitating conditions shape digital dynamic capabilities and how such capabilities influence digital maturity trajectories among Spanish SMEs. Using a PLS-SEM model, the authors show that AI readiness and facilitating conditions – organizational enablers such as specific infrastructure and equipment, support and knowledge and skills – support the development of digital dynamic capabilities, which in turn influence firms’ digital maturity level. The main contribution of this study lies in conceptualizing digital maturity as a strategic process in which the capacity of firm’s for developing digital capabilities play a decisive role.

To conclude, building on the review of the eight studies included in this Special Issue, we believe that the authors’ efforts have contributed to untangling and articulating the discussion on how digitalization and resource-based competencies shape different dimensions of SMEs’ performance. The papers collectively advance our understanding of digitalization as a contingent, capability-building and strategically embedded process rather than as a purely technological input. Moving forward, the debate remains open and several promising topics should be added to scholars’ research agenda.

The first topic that we consider worth further investigation relates to the interplay between internal and external sources of digital knowledge in SMEs’ digitalization trajectories. While various papers in this special issue primarily evaluate internally driven digitalization processes, others highlight the strategic role of cocreation and collaboration as mechanisms that channel external knowledge into firm-level digital capabilities which, in turn, have the potential to produce important outcomes (Vaillant and Lafuente, 2024). Understanding how different digitalization processes complement or substitute for each other represents a promising research avenue. This research line would help improve our knowledge on how SMEs’ interfirm networks and collaborative arrangements shape their digitalization process and what tools – for example, digital platforms and data-sharing practices – may help SMEs better capitalize on heterogeneous knowledge sources (Lafuente et al., 2021).

A second important topic concerns the analysis of digital capability obsolescence and depreciation in fast-changing technological environments. Digital resources and competencies are subject to rapid obsolescence due to continuous technology upgrading, platform evolution and changing cybersecurity and regulatory requirements (Lafuente et al., 2023a; Vaillant et al., 2025). Although some papers in this Special Issue implicitly address dynamic capability development and digital maturity trajectories, further research is needed to understand whether and how technological advances accelerate the depreciation of digital competencies and which digital routines, assets and strategic practices should be retained, upgraded or abandoned when renewing a digitally-driven competitive advantage is the desired goal. Future work could also explore the effectiveness of alternative organizational mechanisms – for example, continuous training programs and modular IT architectures – in sustaining digital capabilities across fast-changing technological environments (Lafuente and Vaillant, 2023). This line of research is particularly relevant in industries characterized by rapid digital innovation, as well as in SMEs that frequently reconfigure their business models or product portfolios.

Finally, Internet-of-Things (IoT) and AI technologies are increasingly playing a decisive role in enabling digitally enabled business models and data-driven competitive strategies. IoT technologies create large volumes of real-time data by connecting physical and virtual objects, whereas AI supports the development of algorithms that process these data to generate descriptive, diagnostic and prescriptive insights. The properties of these technologies add a new dimension to SMEs’ strategy and open new opportunities for capability development and organizational learning (Lafuente and Sallan, 2024). Future research should scrutinize how SMEs integrate these technologies (i.e. IoT and AI) into strategic decision-making processes and under what organizational and ethical conditions digitally generated information can be effectively transformed into performance-enhancing routines.

We are hopeful that this Special Issue will advance our understanding of digitalization and resource-based competencies in SMEs and will add an impulse to increase theoretical and empirical research in this field. Such research is relevant and necessary if scholars are to better understand how SMEs, with different degrees of operational and organizational complexity, can implement and renew their digital strategies to sustain their competitive edge over time.

The guest editors thank the Editor-in-Chief, Jose Ernesto Amoros, for his support and guidance during the editorial process of this special issue. The guest editors are also thankful to the team of anonymous referees whose most valuable revisions significantly improved the manuscripts included in this special issue.