Breaking the Digital Divide: How Traditional Cement Manufacturing Creates Competitive Advantage Through Strategic Resource Orchestration

The Fourth Industrial Revolution has largely bypassed traditional, asset-heavy industries like cement manufacturing, which face significant challenges in digitizing operations while managing innovation resistance and multi-generational workforces, particularly in emerging economies. This study investigates how digital resource orchestration can overcome these barriers to create a competitive advantage, employing a single case study design with five-year longitudinal observation and twelve in-depth interviews from Indonesia’s largest cement manufacturer. The research reveals that innovation resistance is not a temporary hurdle but a persistent institutional feature that must be systematically managed. A comprehensive framework is developed, demonstrating that successful transformation requires orchestrating people assets (digital leadership, capability development), process assets (governance, resource mechanisms), and technology assets (infrastructure, integration). The findings show that organizations progress through five maturity levels—from Traditional to Transformed—by applying sequential orchestration states that address specific resistance patterns at each stage. This study contributes to digital transformation theory by reconceptualizing innovation resistance as an organizational capability and provides an empirically grounded model for traditional industries seeking to bridge the digital divide.