7. Research implications, limitations, and recommendations
ICT use is a pivotal topic that needs to be examined. After all, an adopted ICT can affect an organization or an industry only if it is used innovatively. Companies with the highest levels of returns to their ICT investments go far beyond buying ICT resources and tools. As stated by Brynjolfsson and Saunders (2010), such firms innovatively use their ICT resources by introducing organizational and business process changes. This study suggests that these benefits can potentially be realized in an environment fostered by entrepreneurial spirit. Accordingly, this paper extends the existing literature on ICT diffusion by proposing that ICT use has a potential positive impact on a firm's competitiveness and performance if the opportunities derived from its innovation use are seized and managed within an organization culture marked by corporate entrepreneurship. This corporate entrepreneurship, we suggest, can affect the needed changes at the organization and process levels to better seize and reap the benefits of these opportunities. This conforms to the recommendations to jointly consider technology adoption and use to better comprehend their long-term diffusion patterns (Lanzolla & Suarez, 2012). The above-presented empirical results provide good support for the hypotheses that innovation and corporate entrepreneurship are - each and both - significant mediators in the ICT-Performance relationship. Of particular interest are our results in the ICT adoption model, in which ICT use level has a significant moderating effect on adoption-performance and adoption-CE relationships. Our study has both theoretical and practical implications. At the theoretical level, the theory of innovation translation and the dynamics capabilities view were integrated to emphasize the pivotal role played by corporate entrepreneurship in establishing a network of actors (both technological and non-technological) (Latour, 1996) to better seize the opportunities made possible by two strategic resources, specifically, ICT and innovation, and use them to enhance firm competitiveness. With this theoretical integration, this research can examine the impact of innovation and corporate entrepreneurship on the ICT-performance relationship. Both ICT adoption and use were considered to highlight the important requirement that ICT resources should be innovatively used, and the opportunities they offer should be seized and fostered in an environment characterized by entrepreneurial spirit for a firm to achieve high levels of performance and competitiveness.
