Abstract: Enterprise digital transformation entails more than technological shift; the comprehensive upgrade of cognition, decision-making, and operational collaboration across levels is crucial for cultivating essential digital dynamic capabilities to overcome transformation bottlenecks. However, existing research rarely explores digital dynamic capability evolution from the perspective of cognition-behavior interaction in transformation. This study employs East China Institute as a case-advancing individual, organizational, and inter-organizational cognition-behavior coevolution via its leadership project-to explore theoretical mechanisms driving digital dynamic capability evolution. Findings reveal that individual, organizational, and inter-organizational digital transformation cognition and digital resource action spiral together, drive enterprise digital dynamic capabilities’ construction, enhancement, and leap. Enterprise digital transformation sensemaking involves two rounds of transferring meaning from individual to organizational to inter-organizational level. Thus, this study distills the three-level dual-transfer cognition coupled with piecing, arranging, and orchestrating digital resources, driving digital dynamic capabilities’ construction, enhancement, and leap. It expands research on digital dynamic capability, sensemaking, and resource action, offering practical insights for enterprises to accelerate digital/intelligent transformation by cultivating these capabilities to promote China’s high-quality economic development. It also provides references for understanding how leading enterprises construct digital ecosystems and empower industrial digitization.

Key words: digital transformation, digital dynamic capability, sensemaking, resource action, East China Institute