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NTU Management Review Vol. 34 No. 3 Dec. 2024

boundaries (Nadkarni and Prügl, 2021), providing positive and negative influences beyond
organizations and affecting individuals, such as employees and individual customers
(Dąbrowska et al., 2022; Dattée, Alexy, and Autio, 2018). However, prior studies have
mainly focused on digital transformation’s impact on a silo approach, as shown in Table

1 (see section 3.1). It is essential to understand how different levels of analysis of digital
transformation can be affected, including individuals and other organizations in the
interconnected network (Dąbrowska et al., 2022).

Digital transformation refers to socio-economic changes from a multi-level
perspective: individuals, organizations, ecosystems, and societies through adopting and
utilizing digital technology (Dąbrowska et al., 2022). This definition highlights elements
critical to digital transformation: socio-economic changes to explain the nature of digital
transformation’s influences and a multi-level perspective to analyze the affected levels,

with digital technology as the vehicle of change. In this study, we want to understand the
impacts of adopting a specific digital technology in a particular ecosystem, the retail.

2.4 Retail Ecosystem and Digital Transformation Effects in Multi-Level Perspectives
In a retail ecosystem, actors exchange information and resources that can affect
experience significantly by altering value and wellbeing within the ecosystem (Gardiazabal
and Bianchi, 2021). A retail ecosystem can be conceptualized as a group of actors
interacting and sharing resources within a retail industry through an omnichannel interface

(Böttcher, Rickling, Gmelch, Weking, and Krcmar, 2021; Gardiazabal and Bianchi, 2021).
A retail ecosystem has traditionally been represented as a low-technology ecosystem
requiring digital advancements to offer new service offerings and to enhance the customer

experience (Hilken, Heller, Chylinski, Keeling, Mahr, and de Ruyter, 2018; Palmié, Miehé,
Oghazi, Parida, and Wincent, 2022).
The retail ecosystem has been studied for many decades in the case of digital
transformation because many technologies can be applied and developed to ease
customers’ purchasing transactions. For instance, technology development can cause

the disruption of the retail ecosystem. The development of e-commerce as a technology
platform can also collect some external complementarities (Bärsch, Bollweg, Lackes,
Siepermann, Weber, and Wulfhorst, 2019; Reinartz, Wiegand, and Imschloss, 2019) to

satisfy buyers and offer more options compared with traditional stores (e.g., mom-and-

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