Digital Innovation Capabilities as Drivers of Intrapreneurial Agility in Post-Pandemic SMEs

• Billy Elly

  Lautech

  Author

The post-pandemic recovery of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) has exposed a critical gap between digital transformation investments and the organizational capacity to convert those investments into entrepreneurial action. While digital transformation has been widely linked to organizational agility, the specific mechanisms through which digital innovation capabilities enable intrapreneurial agility—the employee-driven, opportunity-seeking behavior that fuels internal renewal—remain underexplored and inadequately measured. This study addresses that gap by developing and validating a predictive framework that models intrapreneurial agility as a function of distinct digital innovation capabilities in post-pandemic SMEs. Drawing on a cross-national dataset of 491,636 SME technology adoption records and employing machine learning techniques including Random Forest, XGBoost, and ensemble methods, the study identifies production-oriented digital capabilities (automation, digital infrastructure, data integration) as the strongest predictors of intrapreneurial agility outcomes, outperforming consumption-facing technologies. The Random Forest model achieved a test R² of 0.6249, demonstrating substantial explanatory power for a complex organizational phenomenon. Feature importance analysis reveals that foundational digital infrastructure and workforce digital skills collectively account for the majority of predictive weight. The study contributes a validated, replicable framework that reframes digital transformation as an intrapreneurship-enabling capability rather than a purely operational upgrade, offering SME leaders and policymakers a targeted investment logic for post-crisis resilience.

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Copyright (c) 2026 Billy Elly (Author)

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