The new in the old: managing inertia and resulting tensions in digital value creation

Inertia is a crucial challenge in firms’ ambitions to create digital value in their digital transformation endeavors. Building on research evidence from different digital transformation journeys of incumbent companies, we present a framework for practice. The framework displays the various tensions between the organization’s established way of doing things and the critical challenges required to generate value around digital innovation in different domains. We further outline implications for managing inertia occurrences to enable executive teams to cope with inertia and resulting tensions.