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Strategic entrepreneurship (SE) has attracted increased research attention, given its dual focus on creating competitive advantage and exploiting new opportunities. While research interest in SE has grown at a rapid pace in the past two decades, understanding of its microfoundations is limited. This conceptual paper contributes to the development of understating from a middle management perspective. It argues that middle managers’ five strategic roles serve as the microfoundations to firm’s SE. It also drills down to explore individual differences as antecedents in shaping these roles. This paper develops a research framework along with fine-grained propositions, aimed to shed light on future research and implications for practice.

Although firms rely on employees’ innovative work behaviour and effective leadership to achieve service innovation performance, these relations remain underexplored, especially regarding digital leadership. We conceptualise a digital leader’s capabilities and explore influences on innovative work behaviour and service innovation performance, using the dynamic capabilities view as a theoretical lens. Applying a multi-method exploratory research design, our qualitative results, based on 34 expert interviews, deliver a taxonomy of digital leadership capabilities along three dimensions. With 249 survey participants, we quantitatively tested dimensional influences individually (multidimensional view) and collectively (unidimensional view) using structural equation modelling. In line with our mediation results, both views are significantly positively related to innovative work behaviour; still, only the unidimensional view significantly influences service innovation performance. Our results underpin the comprehensive character of digital leadership capabilities contributing to innovation research with a new “antecedal” perspective. We also provide practical relevance by revealing innovation-effective leadership capabilities.