From Resources to Resilience: Integrating Resource-Based View and Dynamic Capabilities to Explain Digital Adaptation Among Rural Entrepreneurs in South Africa

This paper examines how the Resource-Based View (RBV) and Dynamic Capabilities (DC) explain digital adaptation among rural entrepreneurs in South Africa. Although digital transformation is reshaping entrepreneurship globally, rural enterprises continue to face constraints related to infrastructure, digital skills, finance, and institutional support. This study explores how rural entrepreneurs in the Greater Tzaneen Municipality of Limpopo Province mobilise available resources and develop adaptive capabilities to engage with digital technologies. A qualitative interpretivist design was adopted, with data collected through semi-structured interviews with 22 rural entrepreneurs across multiple sectors. The findings show that digital adaptation in rural areas is incremental, socially embedded, and driven more by necessity than formal strategic planning. Entrepreneurs rely on social capital, informal learning, experimentation, and improvisation to sense opportunities, utilise digital tools, and respond to resource constraints. The study extends RBV by demonstrating how resource scarcity reshapes what entrepreneurs regard as strategically valuable resources. It also contributes to Dynamic Capabilities theory by showing how capabilities emerge informally through social learning, experimentation, and adaptive resource mobilisation. The proposed RBV-DC framework explains how rural entrepreneurs build adaptive resilience by mobilising, combining, and reconfiguring available resources under conditions of scarcity.