关键词: 数字化战略更新, 组织学习, 组织惯性, 数字经济, 案例研究

Abstract:    In digital economies, traditional enterprises are required to embrace digital activities in order to survive and thrive. Realizing strategic renewal towards digitalization has become the effective focus for traditional enterprise managers. Existing studies regard organizational inertia as a force hindering strategic renewal.  Scholars have proposed that organizational inertia will hinder enterprises from adapting to external environmental changes. Moreover, organizational inertia has different manifestations, such as cognitive inertia, action inertia etc. 
    In the context of traditional enterprises′ digital transformation, the existence of cognitive inertia leads managers to rely on previous successful knowledge and experience to solve current problems, and refuse or postpone digital activities. In addition, the existence of action inertia leads organization members to adhere to the original behavior pattern in the face of major environmental changes. It can be seen that the key challenges traditional enterprises face in carrying out strategic renewal towards digitalization is how to break the constraints of organizational inertia.
   When existing cognitions and actions are not enough to understand the key signals in the environment, organizational learning is considered to be an important factor to overcome organizational inertia and correct errors to adapt to environmental changes. However, previous studies usually focus on overcoming organizational inertia by organizational learning in none-digital context. With the development of digital technology, the previous organizational objectives, practices and rules of traditional enterprises are no longer effective. Thus organizational managers and employees need to carry out organizational learning to fundamentally change their way of thinking and actions to adapt to the external environment. However, extant literature has not given sufficient attention to the question of how traditional enterprises should overcome organizational inertia through organizational learning to realize strategic renewal towards digitalization. 
    Based on the above research gap, this paper selects Forest Cabin as the research object for exploratory single case study. From the perspective of organizational learning, this paper aims to explore the path of traditional enterprises to realize strategic renewal towards digitalization, and provide a theoretical basis and useful reference for enterprises to use organizational learning to overcome organizational inertia to realize strategic renewal towards digitalization in digital economies.
   The theoretical contribution of this study includes two aspects: firstly, this study describes the process of how organizational learning overcomes organizational inertia to realize strategic renewal towards digitalization. Although existing research points out that organizational inertia is the force that hinders strategic renewal, it has not been extended to the digital context. This study suggests that strategic renewal towards digitalization activities of traditional enterprises have gone through several stages: digital exploration, digital promotion and digital empowerment. In each stage, we should focus on overcoming different types of organizational inertia, which are manifested in turn as cognitive inertia, action inertia and business model inertia. And different organizational learning modes are adopted in each stage to overcome organizational inertia.
   Secondly, this paper reveals the evolution path of traditional retail enterprises represented by Forest Cabin, which has experienced the evolution from IT end, marketing end to process end. It enriches the research on the evolution perspective of strategic renewal towards digitalization. In the digital exploration stage, traditional enterprises initially upgrade and improve digital infrastructure. With the external technological environment change and the promotion of digital activities, it is urgent to establish a digital channel linking consumers. Especially for traditional retail enterprises, it is an effective transformation path to firstly retain customer information and then gradually meet the needs of consumers. Finally, enterprises gradually integrate online and offline activities and build digital based operation processes.
   The practical enlightenment includes three aspects: firstly, under digital economies, traditional enterprises face the inertial forces of cognition, action and business model when carrying out digital activities. Managers should give full attention to the key role of organizational learning to overcome cognitive and action obstacles in transformation and upgrading. Secondly, managers should vigorously promote the application of digital tools within the enterprise and break the inertia of action. Thirdly, enterprises should strengthen the integration of online and offline to further overcome the inertia of business model. 

Key words:  strategic renewal towards digitalization, organizational learning, organizational inertia, digital economy, case study