Introduction: Digital Strategy – Linear Evolution or Paradigm Shift?

In this introductory chapter, we raise three fundamental questions about the emerging construct and increasingly, the research field of digital strategy: Why is digital strategy relevant as a separate, independent strategy field? What is new about the phenomena that digital strategy focuses on and the theories it underpins? How does this new thinking relate to and depart from shared theories’ assumptions and predictions of the literature on the received strategy? Far from offering a comprehensive review of the strategy field and a systematic comparison to it, we rather present a parsimonious account of these three questions, mainly to introduce this Research Handbook and the contributions to it. We discuss what is new in the digital age and how strategizing in this new context differs from traditional strategy. We advance a prima facie definition of digital strategy and highlight a few themes from each chapter’s contributions to this volume that illustrate how digital strategy is different from traditional strategy.