Digital Transformation for Sustainable Business: Exploring Contextual Pathways to the Twin Transition

This thesis investigates the twin transition, the interconnected digital and sustainable transformation of businesses, across diverse organizational contexts. Employing an integrative theoretical framework that combines Socio-Technical Systems (STS) Theory, its extension into Socio-Technical-Ecological Systems (STES), and the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework, the research examines how Digital Technologies (DTs) enable sustainability outcomes while accounting for the multi-level factors shaping these processes. Four complementary studies illuminate distinct dimensions of the twin transition through STES and TOE lenses. Study 1 analyzes 12,778 European SMEs adopting Circular Economy practices to reveal that technology acquisition and development represent distinct pathways to adoption. Organizational capabilities, not capital alone, serve as the true gatekeepers of innovation, while cultural factors such as individualism and short-term orientation unexpectedly emerge as positive drivers, challenging prevailing assumptions about the cultural influences. Study 2 shifts to the technology-ecology interface central to STES, exploring digitalization in Italian viticulture through focus groups with 36 industry actors. It uncovers tensions between technological efficiency and the preservation of artisanal traditions, cultural resistance, and the perceived loss of human control, revealing how the social and technical subsystems interact with ecological imperatives. Technologies simultaneously create tensions while providing approaches to overcome environmental crises. Study 3 adopts the novel perspective of technology providers in agriculture, demonstrating through 20 interviews that these actors function not merely as vendors but as innovation orchestrators, responsible for training, trust-building, and ecosystem coordination. Applying the TOE framework reveals several tensions, such as the "incentive paradox": public funding often drives DTs acquisition without meaningful use, highlighting interdependencies across the framework's dimensions. Study 4 presents 3Bee, a nature-tech startup addressing biodiversity loss, exemplifying STES in practice. It illustrates how sustainable business models evolve through non-linear phases of experimentation, validation, pivoting, and scaling, driven by stakeholder engagement and DTs enabling measurement and monetization of ecological value, demonstrating ecological integration with socio-technical systems. Synthesizing across studies, the thesis concludes the twin transition is systemic co-evolution requiring multi-level alignment. At the technology level, DTs mediate human-nature relationships, extending perception through sensors and satellite data while introducing complexity and data interpretation challenges. At the organizational level, success demands hybrid expertise combining ecological understanding with digital skills and willingness to embrace non-linear experimentation. Traditional sectors face cultural inertia that only generational renewal and trust-building can overcome. At the environmental level, external forces (regulatory pressures, market incentives, ecological crises) act as catalysts, but effectiveness depends on firms' absorptive capacity. The thesis advances theory by empirically grounding STES, demonstrating that sustainability emerges from intertwined socio-technical-ecological dynamics across organizational contexts. It validates TOE as both categorization tool and diagnostic lens, revealing interdependencies across dimensions