Leveraging Digital Innovation for Entrepreneurial Resource Deployment: The Case of Sholapith Craft Artisans of Murshidabad, West Bengal

The present qualitative single-case study investigates how the cultural resources inherited by the artisans of the Sholapith community in Kandi municipality, Murshidabad (West Bengal), are used in the context of new digital practices. The fieldwork was carried out from February 2025 to September 2025 and included two focus group discussions, ten semi-structured interviews, one key-informant interview, non-participant observation and a documentary and social-media review, with a total of twenty-one unique artisan participants. Gioia-inspired abductive coding was used to analyse the data, and the resource-based view and the VRIO (Value, Rarity, Imitability and Organization) framework were used as sensitizing analytical concepts. The results indicate that tacit craftsmanship, ritual symbolism and identity are valuable, relatively scarce and difficult-to-imitate resources because they depend on tacit learning, historical embeddedness and community legitimacy, while place-bound material knowledge and community-specific design provide qualified and context-dependent resource advantages. Notwithstanding, the lack of coordination, dependence, low digital literacy, infrastructure limitations and financial exclusion limit value capture. The organization dimension is partially reinforced by the development of rudimentary marketing, transaction and knowledge-sharing routines through social-media storytelling, direct-to-consumer selling and digital payments and peer-assisted learning, but these are not yet a source of sustained competitive advantage. The study builds on VRIO by conceptualizing organization as an emergent collective capability, not a formal structure, and draws implications for artisan communities, development practitioners and development policy.