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To achieve high-quality development, a critical question needs to be addressed: can enterprise digital transformation effectively alleviate enterprise financing problems by reducing the cost of equity capital? This study uses the text mining to analyze the financial statement from Chinese companies listed on Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share markets between 2011 and 2021, in order to define the digital transformation. Further, this study empirically tests the influencing mechanisms of digital transformation on the cost of equity capital, considering the perspectives of information disclosure quality and stock liquidity. The conclusions are as follows: (i) enterprise digital transformation can significantly reduce the cost of equity capital, and under the control of other variables, the cost of equity financing will be reduced by 8.8% for every 1% increase in digital transformation; (ii) digital transformation not only leads to a decrease in the cost of equity capital through the two independent mediation channels, improving information disclosure and accelerating stock liquidity, but also reduces the cost of equity capital through the chain mediation channel from information disclosure quality to stock liquidity; (iii) heterogeneity analysis finds that the effect of digital information on the cost of equity capital is more pronounced in larger, non-state-owned, non-high-tech and eastern enterprises. This study enriches the research of the influence of digital transformation on external financing, and plays an important role in the promotion of enterprise digital transformation and the formulation of targeted policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents a metaverse flywheel model providing insights into how the emerging layered modular architecture of the metaverse can enable new types of value-creation opportunities for organizations. Based on interviews with early metaverse adopters and innovators, this article identifies three key metaverse affordances: prospection of future conditions, persistence of editable and evolving virtual spaces, and integration between virtual and physical worlds. The findings enhance the nascent metaverse literature by highlighting that new organizing logics are required for metaverse-specific value creation, which goes beyond the previous generation's isolated 3D models and other interfaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While we live in times of pervasive digital transformation, the world faces a physical challenge: climate change. Addressing it requires the global economy to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. "Net zero" describes a state in which, globally, the amount of carbon emissions released into the atmosphere is balanced by the amount of emissions removed. As some sectors and firms are more difficult to decarbonize, net-zero pathways indicate that othersmustmove beyond net zero and adopt a regenerative approach. Although carbon emissions are inherently physical, digital innovation might be the key to accelerating progress on net zero, given its potential to measure, coordinate, and change the emissions logic of the current economy. This paper aims to construct a novel perspective on digital sustainability by exploring how digitally enabled and digital-first innovation can contribute to net zero. We develop a framework of four complementary digital netzero strategies by synthesizing insights fromprior literature with empirical illustrations. The framework serves as a starting point for future research and provides practical guidance for net-zero strategizing. It challenges digital sustainability research and practice to complement emissions reduction efforts with removal and regeneration and to explore both digitally enabled and digital-first innovation for net zero. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the expansion of digital transformation, interpersonal interactions remain the foundation for successful business-to-business (B2B) sales meetings in complex exchanges. This study focuses on rapport building and examines it as an explicitly and implicitly manifested ongoing process covering the entire duration of a B2B sales meeting. Based on empirical findings from a qualitative study of Japanese business professionals, the study develops a process conceptualization of rapport building. It draws on the rapport management model from sociolinguistics, showing how rapport building is based on meeting individuals' fundamental needs for appreciation, approval, fair consideration, and social inclusion, besides fulfilling business-related rapport needs. Based on the data, we identified three phases in rapport building (establishing, developing, and leveraging) and various overt and covert rapport-building activities the salesperson can adopt to create and nurture rapport with a customer by relying on verbal, nonverbal, and intuitive cues. Our findings indicate that only the final phase, leveraging rapport, offers an optimal setting for discussions on future business opportunities. The study challenges the stereotypical notion of rapport as mere small talk at the beginning of a sales meeting and provides valuable managerial implications related to successful rapport building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital technologies challenge incumbent firms to rethink their established approaches to customer relationships. This article examines how a corporate bank reconfigured its relationship-oriented business model to benefit from digital transformation. The case analysis reveals a gradual transition toward a blended service model that first replaces, then complements, and finally augments physical with digital in increasingly complex customer interactions. While replacing and complementing human-enabled services with digital offerings are necessary steps of the digital transition, the associated competitive advantages are perceived as unlikely to endure. In contrast, augmenting human-enabled services with sophisticated digital technologies holds the potential for sustainable competitive advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entrepreneurial clients are always searching for ways to do more with less. Planners can support their clients by introducing them to the concept of digital transformation. To help them further, they can provide basic guidance on how to avoid common mistakes with digital transformation by showing them the digital transformation mountain. This framework will help their clients understand their business value, select and pay for relevant/appropriate technology, and get the most out their teams--all of which will help them accomplish more with less. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Servitization is vital to manufacturing enterprises' competitive advantages and financial performance in contemporary digitalisation environments. Enterprises are increasingly relying on industrial Internet platforms to satisfy potential customers' needs as well as to create superior value, but the literature has neglected to explain how enterprises can leverage such digital platform to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of servitization. This study aims at describing how the industrial Internet platform can enable servitization of manufacturers. Based upon the meta-theoretical foundations of service-dominant logic, we identify the 'sense and respond' servitization strategy enabled by the industrial Internet platform. By performing a questionnaire survey, we find that the industrial Internet platform approach based on the connectivity and compatibility architecture can enable manufacturers to improve the efficiency of resource integration and resource reconfiguration, which facilitates the implementation of servitization via market perception. We argue that the industrial Internet platform affects an organisation's ability to sense the market and resource management actions; these operational resource actions are a significant antecedent of the servitization strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To support adequate strategic decisions, every digital transformation begins with an analysis of the current state of the company. These analyses often include the use of digital maturity models (DMMs). There are numerous DMMs in a wide variety of industries and application areas. While most of these models primarily address the digital maturity of manufacturing companies as a whole, only a few DMMs focus on particular departments or processes. Thus, there is a research gap in this field of study. This paper contributes to the identified gap by developing a DMM for the sales process in B2B project business. Building on a literature review that identified and examined specific DMMs which have been developed in the B2B context, we conducted a case study using expert interviews at a large German industrial company to develop a DMM of the different phases of the sales process. This DMM shall contribute to the research of maturity models and guide companies of different industries in their digital transformation activities focusing on the digitalization of their sales process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digital transformation involves both risks and opportunities for the sustainability of global supply chains. This systematic literature review of 64 peer-reviewed English journal articles aims to show how the adoption of digital technologies is related to (sustainable) supply chain management practices and associated sustainable outcomes. (Non)existing relationships between these constructs will be examined, which has not been done previously. Content, frequency, and contingency analyses are conducted from a practice-based view. The study reveals three main topics in the literature: (1) a mainstream eco-efficiency debate; (2) supplemented by a data-driven, comprehensive long-term perspective on environmental sustainability; and (3) hard-to-measure substantive sustainability aspects that can be fostered by communication, selective monitoring and certification. An integrated perspective of these three topics is proposed to facilitate a more viable sustainability approach. Based on the identified (non)existing relationships, researchers and practitioners learn about the digital technologies and practices they can use to improve supply chain sustainability. Importantly, it should be recognised that hardly quantifiable targets and related practices are obscured by large datasets. Future research should focus on the integration of economic aspects to ensure the compatibility of long-term substantial sustainability goals and the profitability of the entire supply chain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay inquires whether digitally transformed work can be virtuous and under what conditions. It eschews technological determinism in both utopian and dystopian versions, opting for the premise of free human agency. This work is distinctive in adopting an actor-centric and explicitly ethical analysis based on neo-Aristotelian, Catholic social teaching (CST), and MacIntyrean teachings on the virtues. Beginning with an analysis of digital disruption, it identifies the most salient human advantages vis-à-vis technology in digitally transformed work and provides philosophical anthropological explanations for each. It also looks into external, organizational characteristics on both the macro and the micro levels of digitally transformed work, underscoring their ambivalence (efficiency and profits vs. exclusion and exploitation, flexibility and freedom vs. standardization and dependency) and the need to mitigate their polarizing effects for the sake of shared flourishing. The article presents standards for virtuous work according to neo-Aristotelian, CST, and MacIntyrean frames and applies them to digitally transformed work, giving rise to five fundamental principles. These basic guidelines indicate, on one hand, actions to be avoided and, on the other, actions to be pursued, together with their rationales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lean Production Systems are enterprise-specific, methodical frameworks for the continuous orientation of all enterprise processes to the customer in order to achieve overall objectives. Due to an increasing complexity of the digital transformation, the design of Lean Production Systems 4.0 is a challenging task for industrial engineering practice. For this, academia and industrial practice were analysed in a combined approach of a systematic literature review and a field study. The systematic literature review of 62 out of 1600 scientific papers shows that especially the tools, processes, and methods in Lean Production Systems are subject to digital transformation. By involving industrial practice in a field study, quantitative and qualitative insights were used to check scientific hypotheses and identify practical requirements by industrial engineers. As a result, 10 guidelines for the design of future Lean Production Systems 4.0 are derived. The practical implications of this paper enhance the evolution of enterprise-specific Lean Production System 4.0 frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital transformation is a major organisational challenge for manufacturing firms due to the extremely low success rate of such transformations to date. Capability Maturity theory suggests that firms need to develop digital transformation capability incrementally by focusing on a 'vital few' improvement priorities for advancing progress. The practitioner literature lacks empirical studies that validate extant capability maturity models (CMM) for digital transformation despite their importance. Moreover, there is a lack of assessment methods, and those that exist do not specify improvement points explicitly, nor prioritise them. Our research aims to address this gap through a systematic, quantitative analysis of digital capability by understanding the deployment of IT-enabled resources. Based on a sample of 302 manufacturing firms, results indicate that the digital transformation stages are punctuated by various resource-capability combinations. Results highlight that strategy- and organisation-related IT-enabled resources are the key drivers of digital transformation. We also observe that as a firm's digital capability grows at each maturity stage, successively greater IT-enabled resources are required to support this in a stepwise function. To succeed, firms should be incentivised and supported to think beyond technology and develop five specific digital capabilities simultaneously. We also indicate the limitations that underlie our empirical work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the emerging Digital Twin (DT) paradigm under Industry 4.0 has been attracting more attention from both practitioners and academia due to its dynamic capabilities. Most DT studies are theoretical and deal with hypothetical analysis, whereas fewer studies are available on real-life empirical cases. Due to dynamic problem-solving capabilities, DT technologies are widely used in performance improvement analysis in food processing companies (FPC) despite limited implication's for business strategies. Our study incorporates the DT technologies with an implementation case study on FPC and accomplishes the real-life problem of the food processing company (FPC). Moreover, the proposed DT research framework demonstrates the various DT implementation stages, such as strategic mapping and physical-virtual space replica, with rigorous analysis. The results show that DT enhances the existing system's machine availability, allocation efficiency, technical efficiency, worker efficiency, utilization rate, effectiveness, step ratio, and throughput rate. The proposed physical-virtual interface model is executed using AnyLogic software with JAVA-enabled programming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's cotton textile industry is undergoing a critical period of digital transformation and upgrading to cope with pressure and challenges such as rising labour costs and large fluctuations in raw material prices. Developing a cost-based competitive advantage while ensuring a high-quality product is a critical problem in intelligent manufacturing. From the perspective of big data and reinforcement learning, the authors designed a reward value combining transaction, interaction, and measurement data by combining the reward mechanism and Markov decision for a combination of different raw materials in the intelligent textile factory. The authors propose a big data-driven application to the depth of the reinforcement learning to solve problems and build a big-data-driven matching model based on deep reinforcement learning to cotton matching. The offline strategy is designed to construct a memory bank and neural network, and the incentive mechanism of reinforcement learning is used to iterate the optimal yarn matching scheme to achieve the goal of intelligent cotton matching. The results show that deep reinforcement learning can be optimised using big data on the premise of quality assurance. Manufacturing costs can be optimised using a matching model of big data based on a deep reinforcement learning model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Productivity, quality, and flexibility are key production targets pursued by companies that adopt Industry 4.0. However, it is unclear how Industry 4.0 technologies can help achieve these different and sometimes competing targets. This study investigates this relationship through a survey of 92 manufacturers. The study employs Exploratory Factor Analysis to define four main technology arrangements based on 18 Industry 4.0 technologies: Vertical Integration, Virtual Manufacturing, Advanced Manufacturing Processing Technologies, and Online Traceability. Then, independent samples tests were conducted to compare the implementation status of these arrangements when manufacturing flexibility, process quality, and productivity are (or are not) pursued as the main production targets. The results show that Vertical Integration is a general-purpose technology arrangement because it supports all targets. On the other hand, Virtual Manufacturing and Online Traceability are specific-purpose arrangements, adopted especially for flexibility and productivity targets, respectively. Advanced Manufacturing Processing Technologies, in turn, is an integrative-purpose technology arrangement since it is adopted when two competing targets are pursued: productivity and manufacturing flexibility. The study ends with a decision model to implement Industry 4.0 based on the production targets a company may pursue. It shows the interconnection and trade-offs between these production targets and the Industry 4.0 technologies adopted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although digital transformation has aroused the interest of scholars and practitioners, how to reach a win-win situation between economic and carbon performance in the context of carbon neutrality has not been well addressed. Based on organizational information processing theory, this study investigates how digital transformation affects economic and carbon performance via low-carbon operations management practices (LOMP) and the moderating role of CEO ambivalence. We test research hypotheses using hierarchical regression analysis by collecting data from 297 Chinese manufacturing firms. Our results reveal that all three dimensions of LOMP mediate the impact of digital transformation on carbon performance, and low-carbon products mediate the impact of digital transformation on economic performance. In addition, CEO ambivalence weakens the impacts of digital transformation on three dimensions of LOMP. The findings extend the digital transformation and LOMP literature and provide theoretical guidance for managers to achieve the goals of economic development and carbon reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]