On the Convergence-Club Nature of Competitiveness and Efficiency Across Firms by Technological Complexity and Size

Digitalization strategies emerge through interactions among producers, consumers, and institutions across value chains, leading to gains in productivity, the introduction of new patents, and innovations in products and processes. Dynamic Capabilities theory extends the static resource-based view of the firm by incorporating learning and innovation in evolving environments. Its collaborative extension has recently been introduced to analyze the behavior of corporate dynamics within evolving ecosystems shaped by Information and Communication Technologies and firms' digitalization strategies. However, empirical evaluations of how digital value chains influence firm level productivity and innovation remain limited, relying on static efficiency evaluation frameworks. We apply a dynamic Slacks-Based Data Envelopment Analysis model to a panel of 1,369 Spanish manufacturing firms progressing through the emergence and consolidation phases of digitalization that have characterized the early decades of the twenty-first century. We examine how efficiency and competitiveness evolve, finding that larger firms and those in more complex technological sectors show more varied behavior but lower inefficiency. The findings offer implications for theory, best practices, and digitalization policies. The robustness of our analysis has been validated by demonstrating substantial differences between the patterns obtained under the standard static and our dynamic evaluation environments.