Strategic Entrepreneurship in the Digital Era: Integrating Innovation, Technology Adoption, and Sustainable Business Practices for Competitive Advantage

This study develops a unified conceptual framework for strategic entrepreneurship in the digital era by integrating three mutually reinforcing pillars: digital innovation, technology adoption, and sustainable business practices. Positioned within the realities of emerging Asian markets, the framework explains how digital innovation enlarges the opportunity set, technology adoption enables reliable operationalization, and sustainability embeds resilience, legitimacy, and long-term value creation. Methodologically, the article is conceptual and theory-driven, synthesizing contemporary scholarship to specify constructs, clarify mechanisms, and articulate their interdependencies. The integrated model advances the literature by moving beyond siloed treatments of innovation, adoption, and sustainability, and by detailing a sequencing logic entrepreneurs can use to translate ideas into durable competitive advantage. The core novelty lies in advancing a sequencing perspective, showing how innovation creates opportunities, adoption enables their execution, and sustainability institutionalizes long-term advantage, thereby offering sharper theoretical clarity than prior fragmented models. Managerially, the framework guides small and medium-sized enterprises to invest in organizational readiness, digital capabilities, and sustainability routines that reinforce one another. Policy implications include the importance of targeted support for digital readiness, collaborative infrastructures, and incentives that align private returns with societal goals. The article concludes with an agenda for empirical testing across sectors and countries to assess boundary conditions and the persistence of advantage over time.