From Digital Leadership to Innovation Agility: Unveiling the Indirect Impact Digital Competence

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-956-8_3How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Digital Leadership; Digital Competence; Academic Innovation Agility; Higher Education

Abstract

This study investigates the role of digital leadership support in fostering academic innovation agility in higher education institutions, with digital competence examined as a mediating variable. Using a quantitative explanatory design, data were collected through an online survey distributed to lecturers from public and private universities in Sumatera, Indonesia. A total of 136 valid responses were analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) with SmartPLS software. The results reveal that digital leadership significantly influences academic innovation agility both directly and indirectly. While digital leadership has a strong effect on innovation agility, its impact on digital competence is relatively weak. However, digital competence fully mediates the relationship between leadership support and innovation agility, indicating that leadership vision alone is insufficient without individual digital skills. Theoretically, this study extends the resource-based view by emphasizing digital competence as an internal capability that translates leadership intent into institutional agility. Practically, it suggests that higher education leaders must integrate leadership initiatives with structured digital competence development through training, peer mentoring, and policy alignment to achieve sustainable academic. The originality of this study lies in its focus on the mediating role of digital competence in connecting digital leadership support with academic innovation agility. The evidence from Sumatera, Indonesia, provides insights that remain limited in studies from emerging economies.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Shofia Amin
AU  - Zulfina Adriani
AU  - Candra Mustika
AU  - Sry Rosita
AU  - Muthia Shahnaz
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/26
TI  - From Digital Leadership to Innovation Agility: Unveiling the Indirect Impact Digital Competence
BT  - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Economic, Business, and Accounting Studies (ICEBAST 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 15
EP  - 24
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-956-8_3
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-956-8_3
ID  - Amin2025
ER  -