Necessary conditions for digital strategic renewal: a necessary condition analysis of digital leadership, entrepreneurial orientation, and governance support

Purpose This study examines the necessary conditions for Digital Strategic Renewal (DSR), testing whether digital leadership (DL), digital entrepreneurial orientation (DEO), strategic autonomy (SA), strategic ambidexterity (AMB), knowledge integration (KI), and governance support (GS) individually impose minimum floor constraints below which DSR cannot occur, regardless of other conditions. Design/methodology/approach Necessary Condition Analysis was applied to a sample of 304 organizations actively pursuing digital transformation. Two ceiling estimators were used: CE-FDH as the primary estimator and CR-FDH as a robustness check. A bottleneck table was generated to identify minimum condition levels required at each DSR level. Findings Four conditions are individually necessary for DSR: DEO (d = 0.298), GS (d = 0.281), AMB (d = 0.222), and DL (d = 0.196). SA is borderline necessary (CE-FDH: d = 0.137; CR-FDH: d = 0.096), with its ceiling effect concentrated at high DSR levels. KI does not impose an individual floor constraint (d = 0.081). A three-tier hierarchy of binding constraints emerges: DEO and AMB constrain outcomes at the lowest DSR levels; GS and DL become binding at moderate levels; SA becomes binding only at the most ambitious renewal levels a structural ordering rather than a temporal sequence, given the cross-sectional design. At the 80% DSR level, all five necessary conditions impose simultaneous active thresholds. Research limitations/implications The cross-sectional design limits temporal inference about causal sequencing. The single-context sample constrains geographic generalizability. Future research should replicate the necessity envelope across institutional contexts with varying governance infrastructure and test the longitudinal stability of the escalating bottleneck structure. Practical implications Organizations must clear a five-condition necessity floor appropriate to their targeted renewal ambition before pathway selection can be expected to translate into DSR outcomes. DEO and AMB constrain even low-ambition renewal; GS and DL become binding once ambition rises to moderate levels; SA is binding only at high ambition. Because these are floor conditions rather than success conditions, clearing them removes a structural barrier without guaranteeing renewal; a complementary sufficiency analysis is still required to identify which configurations actually produce high DSR. KI imposes no floor at low-to-moderate ambition but becomes a binding constraint once an organization targets the highest renewal tier, so it should not be treated as globally dispensable. Originality/value This study offers, to our knowledge, an initial application of standalone Necessary Condition Analysis to digital strategic renewal, identifying a five-condition necessity envelope and a tiered bottleneck structure that specifies which prerequisites bind at which levels of renewal ambition. This staged distinction between early-binding, moderate-binding, and high-DSR-only constraints complement existing variance-based and configurational findings by making explicit a structural feature of digital strategic renewal that sufficiency-oriented methods are not designed to detect. The primary contribution is methodological extending necessity logic to an established set of digital transformation constructs rather than the introduction of a new theoretical mechanism.