What to teach when we teach digital strategy? An exploration of the nascent field

Companies are increasingly pursuing competitive advantage through innovative use of advanced information technologies, such as artificial intelligence. Management education must prepare students with the skills and knowledge needed to function effectively and ethically in this increasingly digitalized business environment. Yet, we have no consensus on what constitutes digital strategy, let alone how the topic ought to be taught. To advance the emerging subdiscipline of digital strategy, this article takes stock of the teaching in this nascent domain. We conducted an inductive analysis of twelve postgraduate modules and fifteen massive open online courses (MOOCs) to provide an empirically grounded framework. Our analysis categorizes digital strategy-related module content into four domains, constituted by thirteen topic areas. We further identify five distinct course profiles that digital strategy modules typically follow. This article contributes to the strategic management discipline by providing an exploration of digital strategy teaching and offering concrete guidelines for teaching digital strategy in business schools and universities, either as a module on its own right or as part of an existing strategy module.


Introduction
Recent advances in digital technologies, connectivity, and computing power drive 'digitalization' and 'digital transformations' of individual companies and whole industries (Kagermann et al., 2013;Wood et al., 2016;Zuboff, 2019;Gupta, 2018;Rogers, 2016;Venkatraman, 2017).Yet, the impact of these developments on strategy teaching remains underdeveloped and unclear.Business educators, both in business schools and universities, have a responsibility to prepare current and future managers for leading organizations effectively and ethically in the new context characterized by widespread use of information technologies, including artificial intelligence.To meet the challenges posed by changing management practices and business reality, the academic research on digitalization ought to be complemented with an ongoing conversation on the central pedagogical contents related to 'digital strategy', and the ways to package these topics into coherent modules.Currently, the field of digital strategy lacks a canonical teaching syllabus and has no widely used textbooks.While this diversity of thinking helps avoid intellectual dead ends and fosters creative thinking at an early stage of field emergence, an eventual convergence on the central contents would help legitimize the teaching domain, facilitate accumulation of knowledge, and improve the quality of education.
The strategic management discipline has a history of incorporating new empirical phenomena (Greiner et al., 2003) and attending to new pressing concerns and challenges in management practice (Hoskisson et al., 1999), often by developing new strategy tools and frameworks (Jarzabkowski and Kaplan, 2015;Paroutis et al., 2015;Spee and Jarzabkowski, 2009).Although strategy scholarship has developed a number of approaches that help capture the substance and impact of digitalization, including classic work on modularity (e.g.Sanchez and Collins, 2001;Sanchez and Mahoney, 1996) and more recent research on platforms and ecosystems (e.g.Gawer, 2021;Jacobides et al., 2018), there is no shared understanding of the topics that ought to be covered in a 'digital strategy' module.Yet, with growing research on these themes (see e.g.Menz et al., 2021;Verhoef et al., 2021), now seems to be a good time to take stock of related teaching.We thus set out to map the diverse contents that currently make up digital strategy teaching, addressing the following the research question: what are the broad domains and topic areas that make up the current teaching of digital strategy?
To form a comprehensive exploration of digital strategy topics currently on offer, we conducted a two-stage study.We first inductively examined 27 digital strategy modules, 12 traditional modules from top ranked universities and business schools and 15 massive open online modules, to identify the topics currently taught as digital strategy.Through an inductive analysis of syllabi and other documentation combined with our reading of the related academic research we identified thirteen 'topic areas' that we further categorized into four broader 'domains' of digital strategy.These domains are (1) "external context", (2) "external interface", (3) "digital organizing and management", and (4) "digital operations".In a second step, we then analysed the co-occurrence of these topic areas across the modules, enabling us to identify five distinctive 'course profiles' that characterize the design of digital strategy syllabi.
This study advances the strategic management discipline by providing a cartography of the nascent field of digital strategy.We propose a digital strategy teaching framework that helps strategic management faculty to plan and update their teaching to meet the demands of the contemporary digitalized business environment.We believe our framework will help teachers provide a comprehensive and parsimonious account of key topics to students, and to better connect them with the familiar themes in strategic management.We conclude this article with a discussion of distinctive ways to incorporate digital strategy teaching in existing curricula, either as a standalone module to complement the established strategic management teaching or as a central component in existing modules.

Literature review: strategy as an evolving discipline
The emergence of digitalization and digital strategy as a central theme in research and teaching can be seen as a continuation in the constant evolution and renewal in strategy teaching.Strategic management as academic field emerged in the 1950s and has since developed a relatively parsimonious curriculum (Hoskisson et al., 1999) that addresses the context, content, and process of an organization's strategy (Grant, 2014;Johnson et al., 2017).The emergence of popular strategy tools and frameworks has contributed to the establishment of largely shared syllabi and practices across globally dispersed institutions (Vuorinen et al., 2018).The ubiquity of digital customer interfaces and the greater use of information technologies across industries (e.g.Kagermann et al., 2013) have led the academic field to incorporate "digital strategy" as an increasingly prevalent sub-discipline both in terms of research and teaching.

The mature strategic management curriculum
Business schools have taught modules in strategic management for over six decades, leading to a stable and shared understanding of a typical syllabus.The steady canonical syllabus (Bell et al., 2018) is evidenced by the striking similarity of contents in numerous strategic management textbooks.The canon appreciates the even evaluation of both internal and external factors as foundation for strategy (Hoskisson et al., 1999), with ever greater attention to diverse stakeholders and networks (e.g.Cheng et al., 2014;Dyer and Singh, 1998).Despite recent concerns about how well this syllabus has aged and whether it requires overhauling (Bell et al., 2018), strategic management as a discipline has benefitted from the formation of widely agreed "intellectual structure" in teaching, research, and practice (Buckley, 2018;Grant and Baden-Fuller, 2018;Hoskisson et al., 1999).
Yet, this stabile consensus of strategic management topics remains dynamic and evolving.The strategy teaching has continuously responded to new managerial problems: firm-centric lenses analysing the interplay of firms' strategy and structure were followed by market-centric analyses of industries, strategic groups, and competitive dynamics, which were followed by a return to firm-centric approaches focused first on resources and capabilities, and then on innovation and learning.Looking back at the history of strategic management we see that many now established disciplines were initially created to address empirical problems faced by managers (Greiner et al., 2003).Over time, atheoretical problem-solving has been largely replaced by theory-and framework-driven approaches (Grant and Baden-Fuller, 2018).

The emergence of digital strategy as a field of research and teaching
Digital strategy as an extension to strategic management is a relatively recent sub-field.While information systems as tools for strategy analysis and implementation have a long history, digital strategy marks a discontinuity (Bharadwaj et al., 2013).Digital strategy is distinctive from "IT strategy", addressing such topics as network effects, digital ecosystems, and new business models.These topics are generally complementary to traditional strategic management teaching and draw on recent and emerging research streams.While "digital strategy" might be understood narrowly either as the strategic choices related to building digital capabilities and services, or as the pursuit of competitive advantage through digital investments, we propose a broader definition: Digital strategy, as a pedagogical field, entails descriptive and prescriptive knowledge concerning the influence of digital data and information technologies on firms' K. Cepa and H. Schildt strategic choices, organizational structures, central processes, and long-term performance.Digital strategy emerged as a major research topic in the early 2010s, as the commercial success of technology companies drew attention to the coming "digital age" and the impact advanced algorithms and real-time data were having across industries (Chen et al., 2012;Constantiou and Kallinikos, 2015;Davenport, 2014;George et al., 2014).Yet, the field of digital strategy is far from mature, still characterized by a burgeoning of different definitions, frameworks, and theoretical approaches (Baum and Haveman, 2020;Gupta, 2018;Lanzolla et al., 2020;Rogers, 2016;Venkatraman, 2017).As was the case with the strategic management discipline in its early days in the 1960s-1980s, we still a lack of consensus of what exact topics digital strategy involves, how these topics relate to one another, and how to teach them.To facilitate the advancement of this new subfield, we set out to map the key topics and themes in current educational offerings of business schools and universities in digital strategy.

Methodology
We adopted an inductive qualitative research design to explore how academics teach digital strategy.Our analysis is based on a data set of 27 modules related to digital strategy, including fifteen MOOCs and 12 postgraduate/MBA modules from top ranked universities and business schools.In Step 1 of our analysis, we went through the module descriptions to inductively identify all topics they covered.Our inductive coding led us to identify 89 topics across the 27 modules.We then inductively grouped those topics into thirteen topic areas that we further categorized into four domains.In Step 2 of our analysis, we identified course profiles by conducting a network analysis, mapping the co-occurrence of the thirteen topic areas across the 27 modules.We built on the co-occurrence of topic areas across the modules to inductively identify and characterize five distinctive course profiles.

Data
To understand how digital strategy is taught, we began by examining modules offered by universities and business schools.Business schools are historically deeply embedded within management practice and strategic management theories come from engagement with practice (Bamberger, 2020;Bell et al., 2018).Furthermore, given the relatively young age of "digital strategy" scholarship and the strong commercial interest into the theme, we decided to further include high-quality professional education beyond traditional higher education institutions.To do this, we turned to MOOCs that often address pressing current business needs in the form of micro-credentials and provide additional skills and expertise on contemporary themes.Consequently, we decided to include MOOCS on the most prestigious platforms in our analysis of digital strategy teaching.
Business school and university modules.In a first step, we gathered data about current digital strategy teaching.While academic research on the topic is growing and universities and business schools now increasingly offer "digital strategy" modules, this module is still not found as staple across all universities to the same extent as the basics of strategic management.Thus, we used online search engines to identify digital strategy modules from established top ranked universities and business schools.We used the search terms "digital strategy course", "digitalization + course", and "digital transformation + course".Most modules we could find were MBA-level modules for professional education, and a smaller number of postgraduate master modules.We only included modules from universities and business schools that were ranked in the top 100 either in the QS World University ranking for Business and Management Studies or the Financial Times MBA ranking.Once we had identified twelve modules with granular content information, we began analysing the module contents.Soon we concluded that we had reached data saturation, with similar content co-occurring in the modules.
MOOCs.Given the growing prominence of online modules that lie outside of formal higher education, we sampled fifteen MOOCs on digital strategy.We identified relevant modules on the two largest online platforms, EdX and Coursera.We searched for the keyword "digital strategy", which yielded 79 modules on EdX and 139 modules on Coursera (see Table 1).The search yielded a considerable number of modules that had no meaningful digital content, suggesting that 'digitalization' was mentioned simply to increase module appeal.After screening modules with only superficial relation to digitalization, we identified modules that were dedicated to a strategic management perspective on digitalization.Thus, we excluded all modules that cover only functional-level strategies such as IT-strategy or digital marketing, or focused solely on entrepreneurship or a specific industry, as well as modules that merely covered the basic notions of strategic management.Surprisingly, many resulting modules were concerned also with digital humanities and government.After excluding modules that lacked a strong strategy and management focus, we were left with six modules on EdX and nine modules on Coursera, each covering a comprehensive range of topics within digital strategy.
Table 1 provides details on the modules we identified and the ones we then chose to include in this study.The majority of the modules were provided by online education programs of established universities ranked 1-200 in the QS World University ranking for Business and Management Studies.One module was provided by a university ranked in the 451-500 bracket and the rest were offered by university collaborations, or businesses such as Google, Facebook, or renowned international consulting companies.Table 2 shows all selected digital strategy modules.

Data analysis
Our data analysis followed a 2-step analytical approach.The first step aimed at identifying core topics covered in the 27 selected modules.For this, we followed a categorization approach that is founded on grounded theory building (Grodal et al., forthcoming) to generate a list of 89 topics that we categorized into thirteen topic areas and then further into four domains.The second step of our analysis used these topic areas we had derived to identify typical course profiles.For this, we conducted a co-occurrence analysis of the thirteen topic areas across the 27 modules.
Step 1. identification of topic areas across modules via inductive coding.In a first step, we engaged in open coding of the module descriptions to identify the various topics, theories, tools, frameworks, and phenomena covered in every module.For this, we first uploaded module descriptions to Atlas.ti and then generated over 100 initial open codes.Refining this coding scheme, we decided to merge some codes and discard others (Strauss and Corbin 1990), and finally arrived at 89 first order codes.Each first order code represents one topic the modules covered.The inductive coding included topics such as "platforms", "digital customer relationships", or "digital technologies" from each module description.While the module descriptions were at times fairly brief, we used our knowledge of the broader literature to fill the gap.For instance, many of the North American modules were convened by scholars who had published books on digital strategy (e.g.Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2014;Gupta, 2018;Rogers, 2016;Venkatraman, 2017), so that we were able to read and interpret the brief module descriptions in greater depth.Other modules alluded to well established terms such as the "lean startup" (Ries, 2011), the "Stanford Design Thinking" method, or "disruptive innovation" (Christensen, 1997).In deciding on the labels, we drew on our knowledge of the underlying digital strategy literature and revisited it frequently.Tables 4-7 provide references to these central academic conversations that informed our coding of the topics.
Once we settled on the labels and categorization of these 89 topics across all modules, we categorized them into thirteen secondorder categories that we call topic areas.The labels for the topic areas are more abstract and strongly informed by theory, in contrast to the descriptive coding of the individual topics (Grodal et al., forthcoming).For instance, while the related topics 'digitalized industry Fig. 1.Digital strategy topics in current teaching.

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structures', 'industry-level changes', and 'disruptive innovation' are directly coded from the content mentioned in the modules, the last code stands apart because it refers to Christensen's (1997) theorization of industry-level changes.Consequently, we grouped these three topics into a topic area and called it 'digital disruption' to emphasize the theoretical perspective towards the phenomenon.
Following the common approach in grounded theory, we concluded step 1 by further grouping the thirteen topic areas into four aggregate dimensions that we call "domains".Aggregate dimensions add another layer of abstraction to capture higher-level concepts (Gioia et al., 2013;Grodal et al., 2021;Strauss and Corbin, 1990) -in our case the four domains that define digital strategy.This grouping was based not only on our understanding of digital strategy, but also the broader categorizations of strategy topics and themes.For instance, we considered that the topic areas 'properties of digital technologies', 'socio-technical context', 'digital disruption', and 'digital infrastructure and governance' constitute a domain called 'external context'.This decision follows the common tendency to see socio-technical environment as an important element of strategic management.
The results of Step 1 of our analysis are depicted in Fig. 1.This includes 89 topics taught on digital strategy modules, organized into thirteen topic areas and four domains.This analysis forms the basis for identifying typical digital strategy course profiles.
Step 2. identification of course profiles via co-occurrence analysis of topic areas.We took the topic areas as starting point for comparing the 27 modules to identify typical designs of digital strategy modules.To examine how modules combine the various topic areas, we first applied network analysis techniques to develop an affiliation network of topic areas co-occurring across modules, depicted in Fig. 2 in the Findings section.The tie strength between two topic areas is defined by the number of modules that contained content in both topic areas, normalized with the overall number of modules relating to either of the two topic areas.We used the visualization tool Gephi to draw the network graph.
Next, we engaged in qualitative analysis of the co-occurrences.Based on our network analysis we created a table showing the topic areas covered by each module.By tracking the domains covered by each module and the number of topic areas included for each domain, we identified three focused digital strategy course profiles and two holistic course profiles.Table 8 in the Findings section elaborates the contents of each profile.To conclude our analysis, we integrated course profiles (summarized in Table 8) with our inductive coding (summarized in Fig. 3) to construct Fig. 4 in the Discussion section.

Findings
In the following, we first present our analysis of the 27 digital strategy modules.We identified altogether 89 topics that we grouped into thirteen topic areas and ultimately into four domains: external context, external interface, digital organizing and management, or digital operations.This provides a structured overview of the pedagogical content currently taught as "digital strategy" and presents a "menu" of relevant digital strategy topics available.
Our analysis suggests that digital strategy can be usefully thought of as an extension of strategic management to digitalized business contexts: some topic areas extend the existing core strategy concerns (written in bold font in Fig. 1), others provide new strategic issues and concerns (regular font in Fig. 1), and yet others more generally present the phenomenon of digitalization and its functional applications (italic font in Fig. 1).After elaborating the four domains, we proceed to present five typical digital strategy course profiles that characterize the current offerings in universities, business schools, and online learning platforms.

The four domains of digital strategy teaching
The four domains of digital strategy include topics relating to empirical phenomena, application areas, theoretical concepts, tools, and frameworks.Altogether, the topics we identified span six levels of analysis: work roles and tasks, products/services, organizations, industries, technologies, and societal change.For an overview of the modules relating to topics, topic areas, and domains, please see Table 3.

Domain 1: external context
The "external context" domain was unsurprisingly the most common domain, present in one form or another across all modules.The domain focuses on mainly technological and societal changes related to digitalization, but also covers frameworks and ideas related to organization and industry-level changes.While the domain introduces many empirical phenomena and applications, several theoretical concepts, tools, and frameworks, such as 'layered modularity' (Yoo et al., 2010), help conceptualize these phenomena.The external context is made up of four topic areas: properties of digital technologies, socio-technical context, digital disruption, and digital infrastructure and governance (see Table 4).
Properties of digital technologies.Unsurprisingly, each digital strategy module defined and discussed examples of digital technologies, from big data technologies to the Internet-of-Things, social computing, and machine learning to blockchain (Lumineau et al., 2021;Murray et al., 2021).Because digital strategy is often enabled by the recent advances of digital technologies, it makes sense that a digital strategy module, especially one targeted at a business school audience with varied levels of technological knowledge, begins by presenting current key digital technologies.This also draws on the conceptualization of digitalization and the nature of digital data (Chen et al., 2012;Constantiou and Kallinikos, 2015;Lycett, 2013).Digital strategy modules variably incorporated theoretical concepts, such as layered modular architecture (Yoo et al., 2010), general purpose technologies, or modularity (Schilling, 2000) to provide an analytical frame for the empirical examples and applications.
Socio-technical context.Many modules also discussed digitalization as a socio-technical change that affects industry structures, competition and competitive advantage, and customer expectations.This topic area is most often connected to the concept of digitalization, often related to the German government's "Industry 4.0" initiative (Kagermann et al., 2013), the concept of "Industrial Internet", and the concept of the 4th wave of industrial revolution (Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2014).In strategy, digitalization tends to be examined in terms of its impact on industries and the blurring of industry boundaries (Venkatraman, 2017).Moreover, the increasing levels of digitalization has been widely recognized to shape customer expectations for digital products and services affecting also the traditional industries.
This topic area also draws on a wide range of other theoretical concepts, tools, and frameworks to conceptualize these industrylevel changes: digital stakeholders, innovation theory, and national and geographical production economics.For instance, with digitalization, organizations experience considerably greater digital visibilities; social media create vast new opportunities to stakeholders, yet, they also give stakeholders new opportunities to communicate to and about an organization (e.g.Piskorski, 2011).Organizations need to engage in more varied stakeholder communications, deciding which information to communicate in what form and through which mediabut also recognizing that the loudest stakeholders may not necessarily be the most numerous (Barnett et al., 2020).
Digital disruption.Many modules also highlighted the importance of understanding digitalized industry structures, often with a specific focus on industry disruption and competence-destroying innovations (Tushman and Nelson, 1990).To conceptualize these industry-level changes, disruptive innovation theory (Christensen 1997) is often presented as tool to understand the actions of Topics Topic areas Domains.
K. Cepa and H. Schildt disruptors and how incumbent organizations may react to industry disruptions.Digital infrastructures and governance.Some few modules also considered broader requirements for digitalization.These include, but are not limited to digital infrastructures, cybersecurity, regulation, and strategic questions over digital data ownership and sharing.Much of this topic area is highly practical, covering for example the contents and impact of the recent GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) directive in EU.
Some theoretical concepts that help conceptualize this topic area relate to ethics, including distinct forms of organizational fairness (e.g.Cropanzano et al., 2007), and to digital infrastructures (Tilson et al., 2010).Ethics remain mostly discussed in relation connection to consumer data privacy or data ownership (Zuboff, 2019), although more comprehensive frameworks of AI ethics are emerging, such as Microsoft Responsible AI principles.

Domain 2: external interface
Domain 2 covers topics related to data-enabled interactions with customers and partners, covering strategic questions related to digital offerings, digital networks, ecosystems, and platforms, as well as distributed digital innovation processes (see Table 5).Altogether 23 of the 27 modules included at least one topic from this domain.The topics in this domain bridge the traditional distinction between internal and external sources of competitive advantage in strategic management, taking a more relational and ecosystem-level perspective that actively ties other organizations' resources as complements that shape customer value that the focal company provides.Compared to the other domains, domain 2 is most strongly scaffolded with existing theoretical concepts, tools, and frameworks.It is arguably the most theoretically mature.It consists of three topic areas: digital offerings, digital value networks, and digital innovation.
Digital offerings.This topic area is concerned with leveraging digital technologies for product, service, and business model innovations.This consists of generating (1) greater customer understanding and engagement, (2) building appealing smart connected products and services, and (3) monetizing these new offerings in novel ways.This topic area is concerned with the product or servicelevel, that is the combination of digital and physical components that make up the offering.This often requires that firms use digital trace data inherent to digital-physical products and distribution (Gupta, 2018;Rogers, 2016) to build greater customer understanding and engagement with consumers and industrial partners.As consumers inform themselves, purchase, or consume products and  services online, they leave a wealth of digital trace data (Lycett, 2013;Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier, 2014;Zuboff, 2019).Organizations use these data to analyse customer behaviour and preferences to optimize customer relationship management.This creates an in-depth understanding of customer relationships that strengthens and transforms these relationships beyond specific marketing uses.Furthermore, organizations can use these digital trace data to analyse product or service performance for their research and development processes.Oftentimes, these analyses directly impact the development of smart connected products (e.g.Porter and Heppelmann, 2014), monetization strategies (e.g.Walker, 2015), or the adaptation and renewal of business models (Rietveld, 2018;Zott et al., 2011).To conceptualize this topic area, modules teach theoretical tools such as the business model canvas, customer value propositions, or the value proposition canvas (Osterwalder et al., 2015;Osterwalder and Pigneur, 2010).Digital value networks.To deliver novel digital offerings, digital strategy moves from considering the company as individual and standalone entity to seeing it within its broader digital value system, connected to its partners through data flow and application programming interfaces (APIs).Digital strategy modules incorporate these themes using the concepts of networks, platforms, and ecosystems.Some of the modules place greater importance on the changing buyer-supplier relationships, while others focus on the role of interorganizational collaboration in generating new products or services and speeding up innovation.Finally, modules focusing on transaction platforms (Cusumano et al., 2019) emphasize new sales and distribution channels.
Theoretically, this topic area draws from digital platform and ecosystem theory.The topic area introduces the theoretical concepts digital platform (Cusumano et al., 2019;Gawer and Cusumano, 2014) and digital ecosystems (Cennamo and Santaló, 2019;Iansiti and Levien, 2004;Jacobides et al., 2018;Moore, 1996).These theoretical concepts place the firm within digital value networks from which it can draw resources.This places the focus on how to create value with other firms.Thus, the company does not stop at weighing their customers' and suppliers' bargaining power against the own position in a given industry (cf.Porter, 1985Porter, , 1980)), but actively seeks to integrate both actor groups across industry boundaries in order to create a stronger value system (Amit and Han, 2017; Cusumano et al., 2019;Jacobides et al., 2018;Porter and Heppelmann, 2014).This stronger integration of complementors and mutually reinforcing value propositions allows companies to build stronger relationships within value systems (Talmar et al., 2018), causing competition to shift from product markets to "systems competition" (Shapiro and Varian, 1998).Digital strategy modules draw on information systems literature by introducing the concept of boundary resources (Ghazawneh and Henfridsson, 2013;Karhu et al., 2018) as means to govern complementor activity in digital platforms and ecosystems.
Digital innovation.The third topic area is concerned with the changing nature of innovation processes enabled by digital data flows and interfaces.The focus tends to be on customer-centric innovation processes and the use of digital channels and data flows.Although the research on digital innovation processes tends to emphasize distributed and ecosystem level processes (Nambisan et al., 2017), most digital strategy modules focus on the intra-organizational processes, such as experimentation and iterative development processes (Ries, 2011).Theoretical concepts, tools, and frameworks used to conceptualize this topic area are design thinking, open innovation, and internal venturing.

Domain 3: digital organizing and management
This domain is concerned with organizational-level themes related to work and organizing in the digitalized business context.In contrast to the other domains, contents related to Domain 3 incorporated relatively few theoretical concepts or frameworks.Altogether 23 of the 27 modules included at least one topic area from Domain 3. The domain consists of four topic areas: future of work and management, organizational design, strategy and leadership, and change management (see Table 6).
Future of work and management.Digitalization offers new ways of working and organizing that challenge the conventional and established structures and practices.Many digital strategy modules examine new ways of working, including approaches that involve external stakeholders in the strategy process and decision-making (Dobusch et al., 2019;Hautz et al., 2017).First, digital data and data analytics tools enable companies to create and share diverse insights and run analyses to inform their decision-making processes.This raises new strategic questions, such as whether the use of data and analytics augments or automates any given job (Gupta, 2018), the • Digital culture (Kane et al., 2016;Schildt, 2020) • Algorithmic mediation and control (Curchod et al., 2020;Kellogg et al., 2020) • Roles and tasks • Organization

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extent to which organizations deploy algorithmic management practices (Curchod et al., 2020;Schildt, 2020), and who have tools and responsibility for engaging in data-driven decision making (Davenport et al., 2010).Although the themes remain driven by management practice, some modules appear to draw on organizational culture research to capture the core characteristics of "digital culture" (Kane et al., 2016).Digitalization has also opened the door to new forms of digitally mediated interactions with employees and external stakeholders.Organizations increasingly engage in idea generation via crowdsourcing for research and development (Nijssen and Ordanini, 2020), often also in the form of hackathons.Originally a coding-event, hackathons are becoming an increasingly popular way for organization to source and screen broader product and business process ideas.With social technologies, organizations now also have new opportunities for building social online communities in which to allow external stakeholders to engage with each other or with the organization (Zollo et al., 2020).Social technologies increasingly blur the lines between strategic marketing and broader digital strategy activities, as organizations increasingly deploy social computing for complementary content creation (Oestreicher-Singer and Zalmanson, 2013).
Organizational design.Many digital strategy modules incorporate elements of organizational design, relating particularly to agile, team-based structures that have long been used by technology companies such as Amazon, Google, and Spotify.The theme is highly topical, and most of the leading management consulting companies published reports and developed new frameworks concerning "digital organization" and agile "team of teams" structures in years 2019-2021.1While also this topic area is strongly guided by empirical phenomena and applications, we observe that many modules introduce agile as theoretical concept to capture these organizational design principles.
Aside the shift to team-based structures, the use of data and analytics is also often tied to agile methodologies (Rigby et al., 2016(Rigby et al., , 2018) ) and an experimentation culture (Rogers, 2016).Organizations move away from the long-established waterfall development models in favour of more rapid innovation cycles (Ries, 2011).Organizations increasingly pursue shorter innovation cycles to keep pace with the faster moving industry environment of digitalizing industries.This equally requires an organization across cross-functional teams to solve business problems across silos (Rogers, 2016).
Strategy and leadership.This topic area covers a range of empirical phenomena from internal analysis and problem formulation to establish how digitalization affects strategy and leadership across all types of organizations.Some modules we analysed appeared to incorporate classic strategy tools and themes repurposed for the digital context, including developing a strategic vision and engaging in scenario planning.Other modules took a more entrepreneurial approach, leveraging strategy and leadership tools developed in the start-up context.The topics are varied, and some content is clearly aimed either to small digital challengers or large traditional incumbent companies.This highlights how not all digital strategy modules target the same audiences.
Theoretical concepts used in this topic area include digital entrepreneurship and digital leadership.Theories on digital entrepreneurship draw attention to how digital technologies widen entrepreneurial boundaries by allowing the creation of new opportunities for value creation and how they distribute entrepreneurial agency across human, social, and digital material actors (Nambisan, 2017).Theories on digital leadership address specific leadership skills needed for digital organization (Kane et al., 2019;Wade and Obwegeser, 2019) and the effective integration of new leadership roles, such as Chief Digital Officers (Firk et al., 2021).
Change management.The final element of domain 3 is change management in the context of digital transformation.This is also the least common topic area covered across the modules and tends to address traditional implementation concerns in the context of transformational change in traditional companies.Some of the modules emphasized the importance of ambidexterity (Gibson and Birkinshaw, 2004) in the digital context, examining how companies can balance co-existing legacy sales channels with digital business model and digital ventures.Such change management efforts can be conceptualized as leader sensegiving (Gioia and Chittipeddi, 1991;Maitlis and Lawrence, 2007) that communicates a vision for digital operations and helps overhaul their business models, operations, and structures (Osmundsen and Bygstad, 2022).Beyond the traditional change management tools, there do not appear to be any specific "digital change management" concepts, tools, or frameworks.

Domain 4: digital operations
This domain is mainly concerned with the capabilities and processes companies need to adopt and implement digital operating models.The level of analysis is on organizational capabilities and processes.Most of the topics are specific to distinct functions, although some theoretical concepts are introduced to generalize the phenomena.The domain is composed of two topic areas: digital capabilities and digital operating model (see Table 7).Altogether 23 modules covered at least one topic from Domain 4.
Digital capabilities.To implement any changes conceived across the first three domains, firms need to build insightful analytics, develop analytics skills, and attract digital talent.The focus of this topic area lies on the capability-or broader organizational-level.For instance, the increasing availability of large datasets and digitized customer and stakeholder relationships provides ample ground for digital analytics.This topic area is concerned with the use of new types of data and analytics methods to address new and old problems in a new way (Rogers, 2016;Schildt, 2020).Yet, the extent to which a firm employs skilled analysts and analytics users, and to what extent it consciously ties analytics and experimentation into their organizational decision-making processes varies across organizations (Davenport et al., 2010).
Organizational readiness (Davenport et al., 2010) is often analysed in terms of e.g. the necessary data infrastructures, digital talent, digital leadership, and analytics tools needed for running effective data analytics.The concept of digital readiness also connects to a number of elements from domains 2 and 3: organizations that excel in digitalizing their business orchestrate digital transformation along a number of interlinked domains from a willingness to learn from mistakes early (i.e.experimentation), collaborative work styles (i.e.working across silos), data-driven decision-making (i.e.analytics), distributed leadership (i.e.digital leadership), and nimble decision-making (i.e.agile).In consequence, organizations need to work continuously towards establishing and developing digital capabilities and readiness (Kane et al., 2016).
While not explicitly addressed in the module syllabi, we see that the theoretical concept of capabilities (Winter, 1971) and dynamic capabilities (Winter, 2003) are helpful in scaffolding this topic area.Recent research has investigated the regular and dynamic capabilities companies need to engage in successful digital transformation (Karimi and Walter, 2015;Soluk et al., 2021).
Digital operating model.This last topic area assembles several empirical questions and concerns from highlighting the strong customer focus of digital operating models, to functional information systems for operations, production, and marketing, and the need to integrate these to organizational information technology infrastructures.While most topics here relate purely to empirical domains of firm operations, the theoretical concept of lean production was widely featured.This topic area has some overlaps with the "future of work and management" topic area but tends to approach organizational processes from the perspective of productivity and operations, ignoring the impact of information technology on individuals and individual work.

The five idealized course profiles
Based on our co-occurrence analysis of the thirteen topic areas that make up the four domains of digital strategy, we now move to presenting the five course profiles we identified.Fig. 2 illustrates the prevalence of topic areas (the bigger the node, the more often the topic area is covered) and the grouping of these topic areas into modules (connections between nodes).This shows that the topic areas "digital capabilities", "digital offerings", socio-technical context", "properties of digital technologies", and "organizational design" have the strongest and most ties of all topic areas, making them key topic areas.The remaining topic areas are focus topic areas that are not as widely covered across modules.
Based on this analysis, we identified five "idealized" course profiles (see Table 8).Table 8 shows how many topic areas of each domain need to occur at minimum for a module to fall into the specific profile.The first three profiles represent specialization modules that focus disproportionately on a subset of digital strategy domains.The specialist profiles show a strong imbalance of topic areas covered in the "external interface" domain for Profile 1, in the "digital organizing and management" domain for Profile 2, and in the "external context" domain for Profile 3. The last two profiles represent comprehensive modules that cover each domain in-depth, i.e. multiple topic areas for each domain, (profile 4a) or provide a balanced introduction to each domain, i.e. at least one topic area for • Digital readiness (Davenport et al., 2010) • Capabilities (Karimi and Walter, 2015;Soluk et al., 2021;Winter, 2003) • Organization (competencies and capabilities)

Digital operating model
• Greater customer focus • Functional uses of digital technologies (marketing, production, automation) • Organizational-level information systems • Lean production (Holweg, 2007 for a review) • Organization (processes) Fig. 2. Prevalence and co-occurrence of digital strategy topic areas across modules.
K. Cepa and H. Schildt each domain, (profile 4b).Most of the specialization modules were offered as MOOCs, while most comprehensive modules were offered as part of formal postgraduate programs.

Profile 1: the "digital innovator" course
Altogether six digital strategy modules emphasized digital innovation as a source of competitive advantage, with a strong focus on domain 2: "external interface".These modules are concerned with questions of how organizations can leverage digital technologies to conceive new value propositions, often in collaboration with actors outside the organizational boundary.While some of these modules covered aspects of domain 3: "digital organizing and management", these themes mainly provided support content on business model innovation and value orchestration across the ecosystem.These modules were largely offered as MOOCs.

Profile 2: the "digital enterprise" course
Four digital strategy modules focused on domain 3: "digital organizing and management", with a strong concern for questions of how organizations can leverage digital technologies for competitive advantage by adapting new effective organizational structures and management practices.While some of these modules covered aspects of domain 2: "external interface", their primary focus was on contemporary management practices, such as agile, within the organizations.These modules were also largely offered as MOOCs.

Profile 3: the "data-driven business" course
Two digital strategy modules were concerned with applications of digital technologies for cost-savings and improved operations.They were motivated by specific questions of Domain 4: "digital operations", but also included elements from Domain 1: "external environment" to provide background information on operational applications.These modules are offered by non-traditional education providers and provide targeted practical insights.Essentially, these modules focus on applied business analytics, but incorporate a high-level business perspective to credibly pass as digital strategy modules.

Profile 4a: the comprehensive digital strategy course
Nine digital strategy modules took a holistic view to digital strategy: they covered the breadth of all four digital strategy domains,

Discussion
Business schools are charged with the responsibility to educate the current and future leaders, entrepreneurs, and professionals.In a time of burgeoning digitalization, it is therefore imperative that they provide adequate digital strategy teaching.This study contributes towards this end by providing a simple and inclusive digital strategy teaching framework that is empirically grounded and theoretically sound.We first outline the benefits of our teaching framework for teachers, students, and practitioners of digital strategy, as well as for the strategic management field.We then discuss two alternative ways of introducing digital strategy teaching to the curriculum: as an integral part of traditional strategic management modules or as a new standalone module.We conclude by discussing the limitations of our study.

A teaching framework: the four domains of digital strategy
We developed a teaching framework, depicted in Fig. 3, organized around the four domains of digital strategy we identified in our analysis.The four domains do not directly align with the traditional organization of strategic management syllabi in terms of internal organization, external environment, and the strategy process.Our framework, in contrast, draws attention to the various domains of business that are affected by contemporary digital technologies.Although a central aim of "digital strategy" modules is to help managers leverage data and information technologies to improve the competitiveness and profitability of businesses, the modules typically approach this goal indirectly, by illuminating common technologies, practices, and structures that can be harnessed to create competitive advantage.
The key topic areas, depicted at the centre of Fig. 3, represent the enduring "what" of digitalization, focusing on the technological Fig. 3. Digital strategy teaching framework.
K. Cepa and H. Schildt and social environment, digital services, analytics capabilities, and organizational approaches that separate "digital" companies from "pre-digital" ones.The focus topic areas provide students with a more detailed understanding of "how" organizations can leverage digitalization, for example by adopting new innovation processes, embedding themselves into value networks, revising their operating model, and managing the organizational change process.The framework organizes the digital strategy topics in a way that benefits both teachers and students (Ramsden, 2003), and can even catalyze practically relevant research on digital strategy.With a growing relevance of and interest for digital strategy modules across programs, we expect existing strategy professors to expand their expertise to the digital domain.The framework can help professors to assess the most relevant topic areas to familiarize themselves with.From a teacher-focused perspective, this framework helps in selecting and structuring content for digital strategy modules in a comprehensive yet flexible manner.Domains and topic areas describe empirical real-world phenomena and problems (Greiner et al., 2003), and there are already many empirical case studies and theoretical tools, concepts, and framework for each of the topic areas.Given the nascent state of the field and its rapid evolution, it makes little sense to highlight specific case companies, digital technologies, or theoretical frameworks.Yet, despite rapid changes, we believe the topic areas to remain relevant for a foreseeable future.We suggest strategy professors should choose which of the four domains to cover on their module based on their study programme's broader learning objectives, the themes covered in other modules, and their personal expertise.Having chosen the domains to cover, it seems sensible to begin by covering "key topic areas" and extend them with relevant "focus topic areas".A clear thematic structure can help professors easily follow up on latest academic research, case examples and practical frameworks, and incorporate them into their teaching (Priem, 2018).
From a student-focused perspective, a clear division of a module into topic areas helps students to relate and recall different module contents and to grasp the interconnection of different strategic concepts, tools, and frameworks.On the study programme level, the framework can be used to communicate module goals to provide students with an overall scaffolding to recognize interrelationship between the different elements both within and across modules (Angwin et al., 2019).The distinction between key topic areas that explain the "what" of digitalized companies and the focus topic areas that elaborate the "how" of digitalization can motivate student learning and facilitate knowledge accumulation.
An important advantage of a more consensual understanding of a field lies in the convergence between advances in teaching and research.While the canonical structure of strategic management syllabi have been criticised for their standardization (Bell et al., 2018;Mintzberg, 2004), it has nevertheless led to a shared and rather stable understanding of the strategic management field.As the strategic management discipline has matured (Hoskisson et al., 1999) and strategic management scholars have created consensus on its content and structure (Ramos-Rodríguez and Ruíz-Navarro, 2004), the field has benefited from a more rapid translation of research findings into teaching.Just as strategy textbooks have played a vital role in this process, the emergence of widely used digital strategy textbooks can spur research that feeds back into the teaching.Over time, the development and inclusion of digital strategy to modules and programs will establish the digital strategy sub-discipline to develop a shared academic understanding of the field.

Developing dedicated digital strategy modules
Digital strategy is often taught as a distinct module, either in parallel to or as an advanced complement to traditional strategic Fig. 4. Course profile creation with the teaching framework.management modules.We believe this is a sensible choice at least on the short and medium term.The topics currently taught as digital strategy do not easily fit into the established strategic management syllabus.While two of the domains, "external context" and "digital operations", can be related to the established strategy themes of external environment (Porter, 1980(Porter, , 1985) ) and internal resources (Barney, 1991;Grant, 1996), digital strategy teaching tends to value a broader perspective, as highlighted by Domain 2, "external interface", as well as common emphasis on topics such as AI ethics, data governance, and technological developments.The emerging consensus on teaching tends to suggest that managers benefit from a broad understanding of digitalization.Moreover, distinct digital strategy modules allow schools to allocate sufficient attention to maintaining their contents up to date.
Our analysis of the 27 dedicated digital strategy modules in this study showed that multiple profiles are possible: we identified four "ideal type" course profiles (see Fig. 4).We summarize these as "the digital innovator" (focus on innovative digital offerings, business models, and ecosystem strategies), "the digital enterprise" (focus on organization and management), "the data-driven business" (focus on data analytics and data-driven operating model) and the comprehensive approach that incorporates all or nearly all topic areas.
When choosing the course profile, schools should attend to the strengths and knowledge of their faculty members and the programlevel learning objectives (Fraser and Bosanquet, 2006).Thus, other unique configurations of topic areas and learning objectives can be sensible in the context of a specific degree programs.

Integrating digital topics into traditional strategy syllabi
As digital technologies increasingly integrate to our everyday organizational life and management practice, the integration of digital themes into existing business modules, including strategic management, becomes increasingly sensible.To the extent that topics such as new digital and agile organization, data analytics and AI, and related ethical issues will be covered by other modules, existing strategic management modules can probably accommodate case examples and frameworks that exemplify the contemporary technological environment, new business models, capabilities, and digital platforms and ecosystems.
To accommodate the new digital reality, existing strategy modules need to be adapted in the long-term.Challenging industry-level analysis, strategy professors would do well to discuss the erosion of industry boundaries and "convergence" of digital services and capabilities (Bell et al., 2018) and the changing competitive dynamics and incentives structures in digital platforms and ecosystems (e. g.Amit and Han, 2017;Jacobides et al., 2018).Digitalization has also implications for how we ought to understand and teach strategy processes.Digital organizing and management (domain 3) captures the shift towards agile and decentralized organizational forms and processes.This changes the role of strategic planning and leadership, as well as the means and purpose of managerial control (Rigby et al., 2016(Rigby et al., , 2018;;Rogers, 2016;Schildt, 2020).

Limitations and future research
Although our analysis of 27 modules on digital strategy provides an inductive investigation of contemporary teaching in this domain, it also suffers from potentially limited empirical coverage.Most notably, our data was based on easily accessible module summaries, meaning that our findings may be skewed towards modules that schools actively advertised.It is possible that the contents of those digital strategy modules that are more integrated to specific study programs are less readily available, leading us to miss specialized approaches to strategy teaching.Although survey studies suffer from their own biases, future research could more actively solicit digital strategy syllabi and module descriptions from business schools and professors.This would also address our focus on MBAlevel and non-degree modules.Such a survey would allow a more detailed analysis of whether and how digital strategy is taught at undergraduate and various specialized M.Sc.programs levels that are now largely absent from our sample.
An additional limitation is posed by the sampling of dedicated digital strategy modules.Consequently, this study fails to capture the changes taking place in traditional strategic management modules, as professors increasingly incorporate digital themes in their teaching.This provides an important topic for future study, as it is clear that not all topic areas included in dedicated digital strategy courses are equally applicable to mainstream strategic management modules.In the future, it would be interesting to conduct a survey among strategy professors to capture broadly how digital topics are included in regular strategy modules.

Conclusion
In this study we set out to explore the current module offerings to develop a teaching framework for digital strategy.Strategy as a discipline has a long tradition of regularly incorporating new content into teaching, carrying out an important societal role in transferring the complex and rapidly evolving body of knowledge to business students (Bell et al., 2018, p. 234).The task is particularly challenging and vital when the new topics represent not just additional business issues, but an entire emerging sub-field, such as digital strategy.We hope that our initial attempt to map the emerging domain will spur discussion on what professors ought to cover when teaching digital strategy and thus lead to more rapid development and adoption of frameworks, strategy tools, and teaching materials towards this end.With luck, as more professors extend their teaching towards digital topics, we will also witness more academic research on these topics.

Table 3
Topic occurrence across all modules, grouped in 13 topic areas and 4 domains.

Table 4
Domain 1.For Tables 4-7 we have added references to theoretical concepts, tools, or frameworks to indicate how our inductive coding was shaped by our reading of the academic literature on the topic of "digital strategy".

Table 8
Course profiles; the topic areas required for a module to be categorized as belonging to a specific course profile.Coursera and then explore each domain in depth, covering most of the topic areas within the domain.These modules are largely offered as part of formal postgraduate education.4.2.4.1.Profile 4b: the focused comprehensive digital strategy course.Six digital strategy modules provided a more focused version of the comprehensive course profile 4a.When compared to course profile 4a, these modules either covered (a) a great number of topic areas of the first three domains or (b) a more limited number of topics across all four digital strategy domains.This course profile was offered as both MOOCs and conventional postgraduate modules.