The impact of anticipation of new technologies on operational and environmental performance: a strategy-structure-capabilities-performance perspective

In today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment, it is crucial for management to determine how to develop and maintain highly operational, sustainable organisations amid digitalisation. Digitalisation creates conditions for the emergence of new technologies, leading to heightened anticipation in this dynamic setting. However, their effects on firm performance are inconsistent. This study adopts the ‘Strategy-Structure-Capabilities-Performance’ framework to investigate how firms align the anticipation of new technologies (strategy), horizontal integration (structure), and agility (capability) to achieve remarkable operational and environmental performance. Data from a high-performance manufacturing database was used to identify 195 firms across 15 countries. The proposed model was assessed through regression and structural equation modelling. The findings imply that: (1) anticipation of new technologies contributes to the development of agility, (2) this anticipation, when aligned with horizontal integration, further enhances agility, and (3) increased agility can significantly improve both operational and environmental performance.