Metaverse adoption for competitive edge: The role of implementation capability & willingness to change

The metaverse has recently attracted significant attention from the business community as it offers various opportunities for enhanced business value creation. Nevertheless, there is a limited understanding as to why some firms are better able than others to realise the performance benefits afforded by the metaverses. To address this shortcoming, we draw on the ‘organisational excellence’ framework and investigate the role of ‘implementation capacity’ and ‘willingness/readiness to change’ to understand how metaverse adoption intentions can translate into organisational performance benefits (i.e., competitive edge over rivals). Based on data collected from 431 organisations, we test our hypotheses with a regression analysis and complement our findings with a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to identify the organisational excellence factors—pertaining to organisational culture, structure, human capital, and capabilities—that enable the effective implementation of the metaverse. The study findings shed light on the effective integration of the metaverse into organisations and offer unique implications for technology adoption and implementation theory and practice. • Adopting new technologies does not directly translate into performance benefits. • Metaverse adoption decision-making and implementation are intertwined. • There is not a single recipe for effectively dealing with digital transformation. • Different organisational configurations may be equally effective for metaverse implementation.