How Does Technology Enable Competitive Advantage? Reviewing State of the Art and Outlining Future Directions

In an increasingly competitive global market, companies have steadily increased their production, logistics, and innovation capacities. However, the ability to develop competitive advantages afforded by technology is becoming increasingly important. In the paradigm where competition and the speed of technological development grow exponentially, companies must be able to obtain a competitive advantage through the adoption of technologies that would allow them to improve their products, services, strategies, or production processes, among others. To this end, the present study aims to identify the characteristics of the technology to enable competitive advantages. This is achieved through a systematic review of the literature and analyzing its results with a statistical analysis known as Multiple Corresponds Analysis (MCA) developed in the R language. Based on the results, we identify four independent clusters linked to the characteristics of the technology to enable competitive advantages. The first of these clusters is focused on specialization, integration, compatibility, cost and scalability variables; the second includes flexibility, applicability, demand and innovation; the third is related to sustainability, productivity, energy and resources; finally, the fourth one is composed by complexity, utility and connectivity. The implications of the study show how the characteristics of the technology can be applied to enable competitive advantages. The paper concludes with a discussion of the stateof-the-art in relation to the characteristics of technology to enable competitive advantage and formulation of 30 future research questions to be explored in further research.