From Digital Conditions to Business Value: A TOE-TAM Process Model of Business Digitalization and SME Performance

Digitalization has become central to small and medium-sized enterprise competitiveness. Yet, existing research often explains either the contextual conditions that encourage technology adoption or the cognitive beliefs that support acceptance, while stopping short of explaining how those conditions are converted into organizational performance. This conceptual paper develops a process model that integrates the Technology-Organization-Environment framework with Technology Acceptance Model-derived managerial appraisals and extends their explanatory reach beyond adoption. The model theorizes digital value realization as a four-stage process of context, cognition, enactment, and value realization. Technological, organizational, and environmental conditions shape managers' perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use of digital technologies. These appraisals influence Business Digitalization, conceptualized as the organizational enactment of digital technologies across business activities and processes, which in turn enhances Business Performance. Entrepreneurial Mindset is positioned as a boundary condition that strengthens the conversion of Business Digitalization into performance. The model contributes by shifting the focal question from why SMEs adopt digital technologies to how digital conditions become business value, by providing a managerial microfoundation that links firm-level context with organizational action, and by identifying digital enactment and entrepreneurial cognition as complementary mechanisms of value realization. The paper develops a set of theoretically derived propositions and a research agenda for empirical testing across SME sectors, with particular relevance to service-intensive settings such as food and beverage businesses and to emerging-market contexts.