Leadership capability
strategic direction, decisions and support
RESEARCH DIRECTION
Beyond AI Adoption.
My research is not primarily about whether SMEs adopt AI. It asks why some organisations turn AI into meaningful business value while others, even with access to similar technologies, remain at the level of experimentation.
THE CORE RESEARCH THEME
Beyond AI Adoption: Organisational Capabilities as Drivers of AI-Enabled Business Value in UK SMEs
AI adoption is not an outcome in itself. An organisation may use AI in marketing, customer service, analytics, administration, decision support or generative tasks without necessarily becoming more productive, innovative or competitive.
The research therefore focuses on what happens between AI adoption and business value. Its starting proposition is that the difference may be explained less by the technology itself and more by organisational capabilities, how they interact, and whether AI becomes genuinely integrated into organisational practice.
CENTRAL QUESTION
Why does one SME create real business value from AI while another, with similar tools, does not?
CAPABILITY-TO-VALUE MODEL (CVM)
AI Availability
AI Adoption
Organisational Capabilities
AI Integration
Business Value
Sustainable Advantage
The Capability-to-Value Model gives structure to the idea that access to and use of AI are not the same as value creation. The next step is to make these relationships empirically testable and refine the model through doctoral research.
Organisational readiness
preparedness for change and AI integration
Organisational learning
how the organisation learns from use and experience
Absorptive capacity
recognising, absorbing and applying new knowledge
Dynamic capabilities
adapting and reconfiguring resources
Innovation capability
turning AI opportunities into new processes and solutions
Knowledge sharing
sharing knowledge across people, teams and functions
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
The planned research question structure
RQ1: How do UK SMEs translate AI adoption into business value?
RQ2: Which organisational capabilities influence the successful integration of AI within UK SMEs?
RQ3: How do leadership capability and organisational readiness influence AI-enabled business value creation?
RQ4: What role do organisational learning, absorptive capacity and innovation capability play in converting AI adoption into business outcomes?
RQ5: How can these relationships be integrated into a capability-based framework for AI-enabled business value creation in SMEs?
Working Paper No. 1
Conceptual starting point
The published working paper provides the conceptual starting point for the Capability-to-Value Model and the adoption–capability–value relationship.
Working Paper No. 2
Beyond AI Adoption: Organisational Readiness for Generative AI in SMEs
In development. This paper examines organisational readiness in greater depth as one focused part of the wider research programme.
Doctoral Research
Concept → empirical testing → refinement
The doctoral research is intended to examine, test and refine the conceptual model empirically using evidence from UK SMEs.
GENERATIVE AI
An important contemporary context, but not the boundary of the whole research programme.
Generative AI remains an important part of the research, particularly for questions of organisational readiness, leadership and learning. The wider research direction, however, is deliberately broader: AI-enabled business value and organisational capability.
This allows the research to remain relevant beyond a single technology category or current generation of tools, while Generative AI continues to provide a concrete and timely context for focused studies.