Digital Business Adoption and its Impact on Business Performance and Sustainability among Community Entrepreneurs in Malaysia

Abstract

The rapid advancement of digital technologies has transformed how small businesses create value, communicate with customers, manage transactions, and sustain market presence. Yet participation in digitalisation programmes does not necessarily result in sustained digital business adoption among community-based micro and small enterprises. This revised conceptual paper develops and strengthens an integrated framework for explaining digital business adoption and its downstream effects on business performance and business sustainability among community entrepreneurs in Malaysia. The framework combines the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), Resource-Based View (RBV), and an institutional-support perspective, while drawing complementary explanatory insights from the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) and Diffusion of Innovations (DOI). Five antecedents are proposed: digital literacy, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, entrepreneurial orientation, and government support. Digital business adoption is positioned as a mediating mechanism linking these antecedents to business performance and business sustainability. The paper formally specifies testable hypotheses, defines community entrepreneurs and control variables, provides a measurement and operationalisation table with sample items and sources, and outlines a pilot study and validation procedures. A quantitative cross-sectional survey of approximately 300–400 Malaysian community entrepreneurs is proposed, with data analysed using PLS-SEM. The paper also explicitly addresses common method bias, cross-sectional limitations, and the limits of causal interpretation. The framework contributes by integrating technology perceptions, entrepreneurial capabilities, and institutional conditions into a single model focused on an underexamined Malaysian community-enterprise context.